


He ate a decorator once

by dutchbuffy



Series: Faith and Spike [3]
Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-04
Updated: 2017-06-04
Packaged: 2018-11-09 03:05:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 39,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11095566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dutchbuffy/pseuds/dutchbuffy
Summary: Faith and Spike go to New Orleans. There's no troubles like family troubles.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Sequel to "His voice is like a mars-bar" and "He's the light in my fridge".

Faith lifts a woozy head from the springy smooth surface she’s been using as a pillow. The bike has stopped; that’s gotta be what woke her. She sees a glimpse of fiery sky, half hidden by cloudy backlit trees. A dark oblong slides over the glowing oranges and purples, turning the world black. Her cheek lies quietly against Spike’s back and her hands feel the small movements in his belly muscles as he downshifts and turns off the engine.

“We’re here, pet,” he says.

His voice rumbles perfectly in tune with the remembered grumbling of the motorcycle and it takes her a few moments to realize that he’s speaking and what he’s saying.

“This is New Orleans?”

It’s pitch dark, she can’t see anything, but she can feel she’s in a big enclosed space.

Spike chuckles. He moves again without shifting from the bike. A blinding light flares up and then subsides into a small red point that slows softly and rhythmically.

“Outside city limits, my sweet. Sunrise not being a good time to deal with the authorities here.”

He smokes on quietly. After a while the tiny red light arcs into the air and disappears from her sight. Maybe she fell asleep again for a few moments.

“You awake now? Wanna get going then?”

Faith nods against his back and  gives him a quick nip and kiss on the back of his neck, her second-favorite place on his body. She stretches so hard her joints crackle and pop before she gets off.

“If this is a motel, I sure hope they have good reason for not turning on the lights.”

Check out the nothing. Kinda eerie on her empty stomach.

“Not exactly that, love. Demon hostelry more like. A safe house, to rest up and make alliances before entering the city gate.”

“There’s a gate?” she says, her voice still rough from sleep.

“Manner of speaking. Old-fashioned kind of place, this is. Got a queen, her court, and it doesn’t pay to get in their bad books,” Spike answers.

“Are you kidding me? I didn’t pay attention at school so well, but I know there’s no kings and queens in this country!” she says, poking him in the ribs coz she hates being made fun off over her lack of stupid factoids.

Spike reaches back to tussle her hair fondly.

“Vampire queen, Faith. Gonna enter my world for a bit, like we agreed on. No staking or killing anyone while we’re in the sanctuary.”

Faith tugs at Spike’s ear to make him pay attention. “And are they gonna be paying me the same courtesy?”

“’Course. As long as you’re with me.”

She can’t see the grin on his face, but she knows it’s there.

“I’m with you, Spike. I’ll cling to you like a squishy thing to a rock. Coz you’re my guy.”

He pulls her against him. He can see in the dark, which is fucking unfair.

“My girl.”

Something clangs with a hard metallic sound and sets up overlapping echoes in the big dark emptiness. Faith can almost see how big the space is they’re in, just from the sound. Two reddish sources of light abruptly flare out. Torches, they have real torches? Taking the drama thing a little far.

Tall shapes approach. They hold the torches high so Faith can’t see what kind of demons they are, only that they are. Their arms are longer and bend in different places than people arms, and stiff shiny crests sit on top of their head like scorched chickens.

Spike lets go of Faith and steps away from her, leaving her alone and without anchor in the dark. It’s nothing like a cemetery by night, those always have some ambient light. She sways a little on her feet until Spike speaks, giving her a sense of where she is in relation to the floor.

“Lady V still in charge? Tell her it's her old mate Spike come to visit.”

The torches part and a throaty, womany laugh fills the space in between.

“Spike, of course. Interesting hair. And you brought dinner?”

Faith has her hand around the woman’s – the creature’s – neck in one stride. “I’m nobody’s dinner, bitch. I’m his date.

There are snicking sounds like guns being cocked. The voice titters. Faith’s fingers on the scaly neck aren’t restricting the air intake into her voice box at all. For all Faith knows this unknown demon thing might have side vents or something.

Spike quickly peels her hand away. She lets him. 

“Was about to introduce you, feisty one. Va Va Voom, this is Faith. She’s part demon.”

Oh, really? Gee, thoughtful of Spike to brief her before the meet'n‘greet. Let her guess, she’s supposed to keep her mouth shut about being a Slayer?

Slowly Faith’s eyes are giving in her a little more information. Va Va Voom is a middling height creature, her skin white as skim milk and her body curving in unlikely directions. The faint scales Faith’s fingertips remember aren’t visible. The body guards are much more demony, blocky, and sporting blunt black features like a crudely fashioned chess pieces. Pawns, of course.

Va Va Voom’s cool, clammy hands take hers and Spike’s and walks them through a long corridor to a brightly lit space chockablock with non-human beings, the buzz of a thousand conversations like standing next to a busy Interstate. Faith’s eyes can’t adjust that fast and she sees red and green imprints over the bright chandeliers, and the people slowly milling around below are no more than silhouettes.

Va Va Voom swipes two bright red sparkly drinks from a passing tray and offers one to Faith and one to Spike.

“Well met, honoured beings. Enjoy your drink while I find hosts to take care of your needs.” 

Faith’s hand grips Spike’s big cool one. She didn’t plan to do that. “This place gives me the creeps. Who are these people?” she whispers urgently.

“Relax, Faith. Va Va Voom is an old friend. These demons aren’t dangerous; there’s a permanent truce in here. Different races. different purposes. We’ll mingle, look up old pals, sniff out the lay of the land. Try to blend in.”

Faith relaxes her cheek muscles into something like a smile, but her hand remains glued to Spike’s. All her senses are tingling with warning signals. Demons brush past her, intent on their conversation or just on flossing their teeth, vampires appear out of nowhere with startling speed and move away from her again, others glide by with a sticky slowness like oozing snails. They’re dressed in a collection of ugly clothes Faith recognizes from historic movies, like Robin Hood and Casablanca and stuff, glowing warmly under the light of hundreds of the great chandeliers. 

Faith tries to focus on details but has to give up. What seemed unbearably bright a minute ago is now an annoying gloom. Some nice fluorescent lightning would cheer the place up no end. The dim bulbs are making her eyes ache. It’s only when a guy in a weird shiny pink suit, wearing a white wig and shoes with heels and bows, lowers one of the chandeliers and puts in new candles, that she gets it. She prefers demons like Clem, who makes no bones about enjoying microwaves and Wifi. This is just silly, like a demonic Ren Faire.

She must have made some kind of sound because Spike turns to her with his eyebrows raised. He looks damn good in candlelight, she has to admit that. Okay, she’s convinced. Bring on the candles in the bedroom.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Faith shouts back. “This is okay.”

“Yeah, I know. Wait till you see the dancing.”

Dancing sounds cool. She sips her drink after Spike’s okayed it for blood and tries to get a feel for the size of the place. There seem to be lots of connected rooms and a low fast beat is coming from the far end.

“Let’s get over there, baby. I bet that’s where the dancing is,” she says and tries to tug Spike thataway, but the guy who can bend like putty under hands is like rock when he wants to.

Va Va Voom reappears abruptly with two vampires in tow. “Flamouche and Voo-Voo will see to your toilette,” she says and Faith is too surprised to protest when she’s torn away from Spike by a cold impatient hand. 

“Just let it happen, love,” Spike says far behind her already.

“Love your corset, sweetie,” the vampire says as they careen at top speed through long corridors and up several sets of stairs. “We’ll get you into something even nicer.”

“I don’t wanna…” Faith begins, like a whiny toddler, but she stops talking the moment she sees what’s in the room she’s being whirled into. It’s literally hip deep in dresses, strewn about willy-nilly; their colours glowing nonchalantly and haphazardly like an exploded costume store, pinks and reds on the left, blues and golds on the right. Faith is peeled out of her clothes before she can say no and stands shivering in bra and string. These too are removed from her by vampire fingers too deft and quick to follow with the naked eye, although her skin remembers their chill and puckers into goose bumps long after the fingers have become busy elsewhere. 

A drift of dark red smoke is thrown over her head, shapeless and vaguely warm, with a sharp, almost animal smell. Not nasty, just noticeable. It reveals itself to be a kind of long shirt when the corset that comes over it is pulled tight against her body. That’s why she didn’t need the bra. Her breasts bubble up and form lickable pale puddings over the thickly embroidered and bejewelled corset. A couple of baskets – baskets? - are strapped onto her hips and skirts are thrown over it, turning the baskets into swaying hips. Shoes, buckled, with red heels.

Ren Faire, she’d said it already. The vampire sits her down and gets to work on her hair. She’s none too gentle and Faith would have staked her a zillion times already if she hadn’t promised Spike she wouldn’t. She feels like a doll. Her own clothes were just fine, and a damn sight more practical and with-it than this junk. She’s tugged upright and propelled toward a mirror. Of course she’s alone in there. She sees a tiny, beautiful woman in a historic dress, tits falling out, her hair up in a giant elaborately curled do, with one long ringleted lock over one shoulder. Jeez. She looks like the vampire bait in a cheesy seventies horror flick, the one who gets killed in the intro. Any minute now Christopher Lee is gonna pop up behind her.

“You look perfect. Let’s find your Master.”

“He’s not my fucking Master,” Faith protests, but the woman pays no attention to her words. 

It’s like she’s a dog trying to talk to her owner about chess or politics. Which is a fucking good reason to just stake vampires instead of talking to them.

What will Spike look like? If he’s wearing these tight shiny short pants and hose she’s gonna have a fit. Will Spike be pretty in pink, like the chandelier guy? A wig? Every silvery head of hair with these funny sausages on top make her think it’s Spike, until she senses him come into the room through an entrance at her back. She stands very still, willing him to know her in spite of her dress and hair.

He comes closer and closer and she’s so sure he’ll find her that she can feel the skin on her neck puckering, every little downy hair standing up in anticipation. Soft lips kiss her shoulder and she sighs luxuriously into him. 

“So, can I, like, turn around and not pee myself laughing?” she says.

Spike chuckles into her ear, sending the familiar thrills down her spine. Is she never gonna get enough of him? It’s like the longer they’re together, the more she needs him. It makes no sense. These things are supposed to burn out, aren’t they?

Cool fingertips turn her around and steady her; she’s a little bit wobbly on her red kitten heels. There’s no wig or pink silk, which is both a relief and a disappointment. He’s wearing a black suit, weirdly cut but fairly normal compared to the outfits what most of the demons. 

“You look…spiffy. Like James Bond, only, you know, your tie should be black.” 

Spike hooks a finger into her cleavage and peers inside. “Knew you weren’t wearing a bra.”

Faith slaps away his hand. “Behave. These are demons. They don’t need to see my nipples. Besides, weren’t you used to women wearing dresses like this everyday?” 

“Looks like a ball dress to me, darlin’, no tits at breakfast in the olden days. And at least a hundred years before my time.”

“Yeah, whatever, let's go check out the dancing, baby. I wanna feel the beat. Your pals are making me antsy.” 

She strides away in the dress, but Spike grabs her arm and slows her down. “That’s right. Stately does it. Don’t wanna fall flat on your face.”

Yeah, fine, great, of course he knows how to walk and act in clothes like this and she doesn’t. He’s probably afraid that stupid Faith will make an ass of herself in front of his fancy friends. Well, she hasn’t drunk more than one sip of that red drink, which was kind of nice and sweet, and she won’t embarrass him. She can so do restrained and ladylike, if she tries really hard and keeps her mouth shut. She doesn’t say it, but she’s glad of Spike’s arm on the stairs down. Coulda been a nasty tumble a coupla times.

The ballroom, or whatever it is, is much more her kind of place. No candles here, but strobes and black light and a song she knows. There's a dance floor, but most of the demons are clustered around the raised podium in the middle, clapping and shouting and waving dollar bills. The heat, the beat and flashes of the performers get Faith's blood running and she makes her way to the front row. The dancers look like regular people at first sight, and they're really moving, working their bodies like she knows she could do too. 

A tow-haired guy in slashed pale jeans struts up and down the dais, waving his white hat, shaking his butt and showing interesting glimpses of bronzed pecs. A second dancer jumps up onto the stage, accessorized in black from top to toe, hair, glasses, leather coat. He’s made up to look deathly pale and has a theatrical drop of blood near his lips. The two dancers pursue each other around the stage. The low heavy thrumming of the music whips the spectators into a frenzy and Faith senses the excitement rising from the crowd like scented steam.

The vampire captures the white hat. He struts around with it, grinning, then stomps on it and turns it inside out. It’s black now. He stalks the blond boy, tearing his own shirt off piece by piece, running his hands over every revealed piece of perfect flesh. Faith can feel the collective breath of the crows hissing in and out and her own confined breasts pant right along with them. It's kinda hot.

She steals a look at the vampiress standing next to her, her blonde curly hair made up in a bun much like her own. Her lips are opened, her eyes stare without blinking at the dancers gyrating on the stage and Faith sees her tongue sneaking out to lick her full red lips. With a start she realizes she’s mimicking the woman’s gestures. Hastily she returns her gaze to the performance, uncomfortably hot and tight in her borrowed clothes, her nipples chafing the corset, aware of not wearing a thing under her heavy skirts. Spike’s hand on her waist feels heavy and she moves against him, silently urging him to act. The music throbs a frenzied heartbeat, her own, the dancer’s, which she can see beating below the thin skin of his shaven chest.

The blond cowboy is sliding down the vampire’s black leather coat. He seems mesmerized by the pale body, but at the last moment he wrenches away and starts his dance again. The vampire pursues, and the cowboy’s clothes are stripped off until only his boots and his string remain. The vampire dancer runs his tongue up and then down the bare chest, and whoa, she never realized two guys together could be this hot. Enthusiastic demons wave their dollar bills and stuff them in his underwear. Faith kinda wishes she had money to wave around, these guys are wicked good.

The cowboy walks around grinning until he’s once more caught by the vampire dancer. He’s forced onto his knees; he’s struggling, eyes pleading theatrically for help until his face is pressed to the black-covered groin. The vampire shakes his hips in a lewd gesture of fake sex, or at least Faith assumes it’s fake, and bends his white torso forward until he's kissing the cowboy’s tanned throat. He lifts the cowboy up, whose supple body is leaning further and further backward in surrender, and the vampire pretends to sink his fangs in him. 

The crowd becomes even more frenzied and the waving bills’ denominations are higher. The captive dancer is presented to a tall woman, another vampire Faith guesses, and she grasps his tanned thighs in her white white hands and presses his groin into her face. His body shudders and his hands clench. Faith is impressed at his skill. It’s like real, and every shiver races through her own body. Spike hands’ knead her breasts and she can feel his cock bumping her ass through all the layers and layers of skirts. 

The dark dancer takes the cowboy away. He’s hanging face-down from the other man’s arms, exhausted. He’s presented to the next customer. Faith idly checks out vampire woman to her left and catches her in game face, still lustfully licking her lips, waving her hundred dollar bill in eager anticipation. Her eyes return to the woman across the stage who’s wiping away red fluid from her mouth, also in game face. It’s dawns on her sharply, like a slap, that this is all real.

Faith grips the edge of the stage hard. She’s going to fall; she’s going to be sick right here. The lights turn the drop of blood in the corner of the vampire’s mouth into a glistening currant red, then black poison as the light turns blue. She forces herself upright again and checks out the blond dancer. Is he still alive? His chest rises shallowly, but he seems unconscious, his face white and shiny with sweat. She starts to hoist herself up to the stage, but hasn’t counted on Spike hauling her back down.

"Spike!" Faith hisses. "Lemme go. We have to save that guy. Come on, they’re killing him."

Spike grinds his hands into her upper arms. "Don’t be daft, Faith. It’s a performance, remember? It isn’t real."

"Yes it is! I saw that woman drink his blood!"

“It’s still a performance. He’s no victim, he's a professional. He knows what he’s doing."

Faith still feels sick. She got off on the performance; the idea of a vampire stalking his prey makes her hot. What does that make her? She’s a Slayer, dammit.

"I gotta get out of here."

She elbows her way through the throng of swinging, excited demons and vampires, not caring if she steps on toes or jostles drinks. Spike is hard on her heels, talking fast.

"We can’t leave yet, Faith. This is important. We can make alliances here, find information."

His reasonable, cajoling voice flips her last switches.

“Is this another of your fucking plans of turning me into Buffy? Buffy wears pretty clothes, let’s dress up Faith? Buffy had friends; poor Faith must not be alone? I'm not her, Spike. I'm me, and I work alone, and I don’t want anything to do with your  fucking creepy friends."

She shakes Spike off and tries to find her way back through all the confusing rooms. Finally she recognizes a door and storms down the stairway to the dark garage, Spike still following. 

 “Faith! Wait! It's daylight, and there are no tunnels here. Please stay."

“I’m not staying here, this place is making me sick. Lemme go. I need to get out of here."

Spike tries to hold her, but his restraining arms and the tight corset clenching around her rib cage make her panicky and she overreacts by punching his nose. He lies still on the floor, touching it gingerly, staring up at her.

"Now what, Faith? Gonna run off and leave me here?” 

“You bet," she says. 

He sounds both wigged and resigned, and she knows he’s thinking of Buffy doing this, but she doesn’t care, as long as she’s out of here and away from his scheming and plans for her. No more.

"I’ll meet you somewhere tonight," he says quickly, "Where will you be?"

“I don't know," she says, suddenly very sad and tired. She’ll be damned if she’s gonna cry. “I don't fucking know this town, do I?" She turns away. She doesn’t want to talk right now.

"There's a cafe, in the French Quarter,” Spike says. “The Moulin Noir. Meet me there at nine, okay?"

"Yeah, okay,” she says. 

Whatever it takes to get her out of here now. Her flaming desire to get out of here deflates like a sad balloon and leaves a stale, tired feeling. What’s the point of all this, anyway? Faith trudges down the stairs and enters the dark garage. How will she find the bike? She pats the wall behind the door and there's an ordinary light switch right there. They used torches for God’s sake. Show-offs. They should be happy that there's fucking electricity and fucking TV and fucking Lycra. Jeez. She chucks the fucking birdcage under her skirts, ties the billowing cloth into a big knot and starts the bike. The door opens automatically like a normal parking lot. She’s never been so glad to see the morning sun in the hazy white sky and the pale road lying flat on the ground, waiting for her to drive over it. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and ayinhara. Thanks guys!

It isn’t as much of a hoot as Faith keeps telling herself, knocking around in a strange city all by her lonesome. She’d have been all right before, but now she knows what it feels like to do stuff together with Spike. Her proud solo explorations of Boston and LA, and every city in between, don’t seem as cool as they once did. Just lonely.

She’d planned to get into the city straight from the demon stronghold, but she gets lost in no time at all. All the narrow dirt roads, steaming swamps and fields look alike under the white sun and the white sky and the county is real tightfisted about signposts. It seems totally abandoned, but the moment she finally gets off the bike to change out of the ridiculous dress, she’s surrounded by local toughs. They make fun of her in their twangy lingo that she isn’t sure is even English. She talks her way out of it, she hasn’t a moment of fear that she might need to  user her Slayer strength, but they sure as hell got a good look at her tits. Assholes. 

Eventually she finds her way back to more civilized and signposted country by following a bus she saw from across a flat, drenched field of something green and sprouty. Once inside the city limits it's the easiest thing ever to find the French Quarter. She guesses that’s where the City Council really wants out-of-towners to be. 

After getting stuck in the third traffic jam Faith decides that she better park the bike, and she shells out a few of her precious dollars to stable it in a guarded lot. Money is hard to come by these days. The Council isn’t paying them anymore, and Spike insists on earning it the honest way. Faith’s soul never bothers her like that. It’s real insistent about not killing, but a little stealing leaves it cold.

Now that she’s on foot in the colorful, busy thoroughfares of the old town, hobnobbing with the tourists,  it would be so fucking easy to get some wallets. But she doesn’t. She’s promised Spike, and as she doesn’t think they’ve broken up - fingers crossed - she intends to keep that promise. 

Within minutes, another problem starts blaring for attention. It’s frickin hot here, worse than Sunnyhell or LA, and at night on the bike she hardly noticed. It’s a wet heat that presses on her back like a 300-pound guy; her jeans drag her down like lead and her feet are swimming in the sturdy boots. She ties her jacket around her waist but even there it’s sending out stifling waves of warmth. Faith refuses to even think of wearing a skirt, but she is thinking of popping into an ally and cutting off the legs of her pants. She catches sight of a thrift shop and flees inside to get a moment of free AC.

“New in town?” the sales woman says. She’s carrying a lot of extra pounds but looks relatively cool in flowered cotton. “Look, I got a sweet line of pretty cotton skirts in here, and what about these sandals? Hardly worn.” 

The girly pinks and pale greens are so not Faith’s thing. 

“You got any black shorts?” she says, eyeing the rows and rows of colorful clothes.

“Black is hotter than white, honey,” the woman says, but she obligingly shuffles up to the rows of skirts and starts looking. “You’re what, a four?”

“Yeah,” Faith says, rummaging through a heap of shoes. “Six on top.”

“Better than the other way around, like me. Here, have a look at this. Almost black.”

It’s not almost black, and besides, it’s a skirt, not shorts. It’s purple, with black and cream sprigged flowers all over it. It’s so not her. Faith tries it on after the woman makes a bet with her that it’ll be cooler than cut-offs. Faith loses the bet and shells out a few dollars. It’s the only thing that's even remotely wearable, and it’s heaven to have the thin cotton floating around her thighs instead of sticking to them. Red flip-flops complete the new ladylike Faith ensemble. Her tank’s black, so she still looks like Faith on top. It’ll have to do. She buys a short denim skirt just coz it’s denim, and then she‘s ready to venture forth onto the streets again.

“One more thing, sweetie,” the saleslady calls out to her.

She comes at Faith with some kind of little jaw thing splayed wide open, pointed at her, and Faith’s hand is moving to the knife in her boots, which aren’t there, and she almost panics until she realizes it’s just a hair clip.

“What? No, lady, please, I hate ponytails and stuff.”

“It’ll be  cooler than having all that heavy hair on your neck,” the woman says implacably and Faith has no defenses against that kind of motherly tone.

Faith meekly stands while the shopkeeper fusses with her hair, and it’s already a relief to have it lifted off her sweaty neck. Faith looks in the mirror again, and it scares her how much she looks like the old-fashioned noblewoman she saw in the vampire mirror, even though her look is not that prehistoric. It’s just so girly. Dainty little feet in flip flops, a slender neck. She looks so fucking small. Like a blow would break her.

Faith sighs. She doesn’t need her armor of jeans and leather, she’s a Slayer and she can kill just about anything. She’s got Spike. She hopes. She sighs again. The skirt is wide enough to kick out if need be. The flip-flops will not have the impact her steel toed boots had, but God, the relief. She’ll risk it.

She turns away but at the very last minute, she remembers something from long ago. “Thanks, ma’am,” she says, eight-year old Faith visiting one of her gran’s wrinkly old pals.

The woman beams at her. “Y’all take care now, hon. That young man of yours sure won’t mind seeing you like that!”

Faith grimaces and with a quick nod she escapes the too kind gaze. Maybe Spike will appreciate it, which is kind of scary in itself. She vowed never to be pretty-pretty like Buffy, and now look at her. If Spike likes it, will she feel good about it? 

She enters the thick slow stream of people again, eddying and clotting on corners and in front of the street musicians. She likes the music. In fact, she likes this place. Now that she’s cooler and calmer, she notices that it’s not just people milling around. There’s lots of faces that bear the signs of demon blood, often just tiny subtle signs, a scale pattern on the cheeks, a feathering of the hair, elbows that bend too far back. So New Orleans is a mixed race town, huh? 

But she gets enough of listening to music and watching people. And finally it’s not only boring, but also fucking expensive to hang around town all afternoon. She keeps getting hungry and thirsty, Spike is not around to take the edge off, and she’s getting really sorry about storming off. At last, dusk falls, and she’s long spotted the café Spike referred to. Now she can enter it and sit down. Her feet ache.

Café Moulin Noir is a busy place, and of course, she hasn’t reserved a table. The clientele is a mixed bag of mostly elderly tourists, for whom she guesses there is no off-season. In the back, where a narrow strip of tables runs deep into the building, it’s darker and the guests have caps and hats pulled down low over their faces. Faith waits meekly in line for the maitre d’s attention. 

The maitre d’ looks down on her from his lofty height and is about to refuse her when Faith notices the greenish color of the nails that tap impatiently on his clipboard. She has a brainwave.

“I’m supposed to meet my boyfriend Spike here. Did he call ahead for a reservation?”

The maitre d’ looks her over again, with a whole different vibe this time. He bows slightly.

“There’s always a table for a friend of Spike’s. Follow me, mademoiselle.”

Hey. Not bad.

She gets a tiny table wedged in between the wall and a giant wedding party, or something like it. Her spidey sense careens into overdrive and the penny drops in her tired brain. The upturned collars, caps and gloves all the back room guests are wearing? Camouflage, baby. The café is chockablock with all kinds of demons here. Not just vampires, but she gets why Spike used to hang out here way back when.

She checks out the big clock behind the tap. Quarter past nine already. She must have been here on time, but no Spike. She decides to start eating without him; she needs it more than he does.

Dinner arrives, which Faith thinks is nice: hot, salty and spicy. She leans back against the wall of the restaurant, feeling pleasantly full and ready for action. Her hair snags on one of the framed photographs that cover the wall, showing café scenes and visitors from its past history. She checks it out idly while she frees the strands and a dark figure in the middle catches her attention. She holds up the sepia toned old photograph in the dim pool of light thrown by the café’s period lamps. It's a young man with a pencil-thin mustache on his lip, his arm tight about a dark girl in old-fashioned clothes. She’s flat-chested and has a big thing for beaded fringes. 

Check that out. It's Spike. Hard to tell with the hat and the mustache, but if you look closer, definitely him. Who would the girl be? A memory of her first Watcher talking swims up, one she didn't even realize she had. The Fanged Four. Faith remembers that some point Angelus became Angel and left the others. Angelus was once the Scourge of Europe. She mostly knows him as Angel, who was kind to her and taught her about guilt and atonement. She peers over the photo again. If you look closely, you can see that the stiff posed rows are full of demon or half-demon faces. 

Faith gets up to look at some other photographs on the wall. It's kind of odd to think that demons, who live longer than humans, and live in their own peculiar way, should pose just like their human contemporaries. Standing stiff in the early years, getting more and more colorful and looser the more recent the photo is. 

"Who're you looking for, my little sugar? I could tell you stories about each and every one of them; I‘ve been here from the very beginning!" 

A wavery old voice pierces her concentration, somewhere at midriff-height. Faith looks around and down, and there is a tiny old woman standing there, leaning on a cane with one hand. Her other shriveled little claw grasps Faith's wrist, as if she's scared Faith will run away. Faith doesn't get a demony vibe from the old creature, even though she's as wrinkled and discolored as a headhunter's trophy and resembles a tortoise more than a person. Wisps of white hair cling to her spotted shiny scalp, and her dark eyes peer out between fold after fold of fragile papery flesh.

She cackles a bit when Faith tries to disengage from her little old claw, but she's surprisingly strong and Faith doesn’t wanna exert any pressure on her stick-like arm for fear it’ll snap.

The old woman points with her cane at the photograph Faith’s holding; it's a small miracle the glass doesn't shatter. "I'm on this very photograph, girlie, and I knew each and every person on it. Guess which one I am? Come on, guess!"

She looks up expectantly at Faith, who doesn’t have the heart not to. She points to the girl standing next to Spike, the one he has his arm so possessively around.

"This one?" 

The old woman nearly presses her nose against the glass and moves the portrait slowly past her narrow field of vision. Her hand starts to tremble and she drops the frame, but Faith catches it. The old lady's tiny chin wobbles and she looks beseechingly at Faith. 

"Who are you? My memory is perfect!" she says with a plea in her voice. "When she was here yesterday I was just as old as I am now, I'm not imagining it, I'm not! That wasn't her, was it? Are you playing games with me? Raoul! Raoul! She's teasing me, the mean little girl, she's making me think I saw ghosts. The man with the white hair and the creepy girl are in this photograph, don’t you see? I'm not crazy! My memory is perfect!"

Faith doesn't know what to do. A giant young man materializes at her elbow. "Are you upsetting Tante Marie, young lady? 

Jesus. She’ll fight her way out of anywhere, but dealing with old ladies and testy waiters is not her strong suit.

"No, of course not," Faith says quickly. "She was just telling us about these old pictures, that she was in them and all."

The man, so tall his face is mostly in the dark and his stomach is at its greatest width at Faith's eye height, looms over her menacingly. "Why is she crying, then? Wasn't she the prettiest girl in the picture, then?"

"Absolutely. She was a great beauty in her youth," Faith babbles on.

Faith is calculating the angle her elbow would have to be in to hit the young man's gut at the most vulnerable spot and decides to go for his balls instead if need be. But he nods curtly and puts his big soft hand on the old woman's back. 

"Come, Tante. Mamie has your treat ready."

He throws a last look at Faith. "Tante's memory is no longer very reliable, girl. That photograph is from the late twenties, and there's not a lot of people alive from that time."

"Maybe they're not people," Faith says softly to his retreating back.

He stiffens and turns faster than Faith would have thought possible for a man of his bulk, stabbing a thick sausage finger in their direction. "Sit down, ladies. Jacques, Michel, serve the young lady here a drink on the house and keep her company." 

Not just two, but eight or ten assorted demons suddenly surround them, smiling wide smiles down at her in several colors, ranging from yellowy vampire fangs to greenish tusks or black needle teeth.

Gloomily she stirs the melted remains of her dessert. The tall figure behind her coughs loudly and jostles her elbow, spilling her drink.

"Hey!" Faith says, always quick to flare up, and the vampire says "Excuse me, ma'am," flashing a second of snarling game face at her to make the words a threat.

Faith digs her thumb into her own nail bed. This is not the time to get feisty with the creep, surrounded as he is by dozens of his homies.

The tall soft young man and the maitre d' return. It’s obvious they're family now that Faith sees them together. He sits down at Faith's table without preamble and with a flick of one meaty finger has two brownish drinks in low glasses served up.

"So, mademoiselle. You are waiting for William the Bloody?"

Faith nods. "Yeah. What of it?"

"When do you expect him?"

"Look, it’s none of your business, okay? I guess he stood me up. I didn’t use his name to get me a table under false pretenses or anything."

A mouth full of small square teeth is bared. 

He holds up a thick stiff piece of paper.

"It was left here for him and we found it lying under the table when he left," he explains. "Look."

So Spike’s been in here already? Is that what he’s saying? She gingerly folds open the funny looking piece of paper. It’s almost like thin leather.

"Meet me where the white angels weep," it says, in a big bold old-fashioned script. It looks as if it's been written with a leaky pen in red brown ink. Or blood. Signed with an elaborate curly 'D'. Dawn, of course.

Faith wrinkles her nose. "Why would Dawn wanna meet Spike in a church, why not pick a motel?"

"It's a graveyard," the proprietor says.

She sniffs the letter. It smells faintly and sweetly of wet iron, rust, and something else, something cloying and unpleasant. She wishes she knew names of spices or flowers.

"Cloves. Violets, maybe. Like my grandma."

"Mine smelled of beeswax," Faith says. 

"Who would send Spike a letter like this? It has to be someone he knows," the proprietor reasons. 

"Yeah, I know," Faith says testily. "Knows her too damn well, if you ask me. In the fucking Biblical sense."

The proprietor nods. "So you do know who I mean, mademoiselle." He jerks his head in the direction of the photograph. "Her. After she was warned by my grandfather never to show her face here again. She was here last night. Left a letter for your boyfriend when he came in earlier this evening. Took one look at it and stormed off."

The big man waits patiently. At last, something else he says registers. "Your grandfather? We're not talking a slutty shiny haired schoolgirl, are we? Who are we talking about?"

He sits down heavily and frowns at her in defeat. "I thought you knew. Who she was and what she was. We hoped you could help us. Her name is Drusilla; she was with Spike when we last saw her here eighty years ago."

Faith hears only that it couldn't have been Dawn. She has to fight the urge to slam her head on the table down from sheer relief. She could cry, she’s so tired from driving around in an unknown city full of weird half-breed demons without him. She needs him. Like now. To hold her tight and make her feel like a real girl, and make-up sex would be a good plan, too

Drusilla. Faith thinks she’s the younger one; not Angelus’ mom but Spike’s. It sounds as if Drusilla is still alive and that she was here today. And Spike too? It's not clear if they were here together or apart. Faith checks the clock again. Quarter past ten. Even if Spike's not exactly a man of the clock, this is late for him. He went off with his vampire Mom instead of her? Great. She lets him out of her sight for twelve hours and he's gone off with his former sweetheart already. She'll just kick Drusilla’s ass when she finds them - and he had better not be bending her over a tombstone.

“I do know who and what they are. I’ve just never met Drusilla before. Point me in the way of the fucking cemetery and I’ll turn her skanky ass into skanky ash,” Faith says.

She jumps up, eager to get going, with a new goal and her belly full of good food. 

The proprietor signals with his hand to one of his minions and then just looks at her. "Where are you going, mademoiselle? Do you know the way?"

Of course she doesn't.

He gestures her back to her chair. "My nephew will guide you there. I trust you can defend yourself? You are what they call a tueuse des Vampires, no?"

"I'm a Slayer, yeah," Faith says tersely, balancing on the edge of her chair. 

She needs to be off, now. Can't they get a move on? A giant gangly youth emerges from the kitchen, not yet as fat as his elder relatives, but weirdly wide and soft like an overgrown mushroom. Faith doesn’t know what their kind is, or what part is demonic and what part human.

"Pierrot, you will direct the young lady to Sacre Coeur, the tomb with les anges lacrimeuses. You know it?"

"Yes, uncle."

His big round eyes flick over Faith, resting longest on her breast. Well, that kind of behavior she's familiar with. No pimply youth, even if he's nearly seven feet tall, is gonna scare her. She’s striding towards the bike before the boy takes the lead. She’s gonna rescue her man and no one better stand in her way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and meko00. Thanks guys!

The night is still as busy and muggy as earlier. Faith follows the young demon on his moped through a maze of alleyways and one surprise stretch of highway. She’s pretty sure she couldn't find her way back if her life depended on it. Her guide stops in front of a closed gate in high, white-washed walls. 

"This is the cemetery, Mam'zelle," he says. "Will you be all right on your own?"

He makes as if to ride off, but Faith is off her bike faster than a greased thought and clamps her hand on his flabby forearm. "I will be just fine in the cemetery, yeah. But I can't find my way back to the café on my own, so you be a good boy and wait for me."

She can't read his face behind the helmet, but he nods. "Bien sûr." 

Faith parks the bike in a better spot and gets out a stake and a big knife from her duffel bag. Drusilla, baby, your undead ass is grass. She jumps to the top of the brick wall and looks over the cemetery spread out beneath her. It’s huge. Full of tombs in all sizes and thick with wicked ugly statuary, most of them weeping angels, to make her life even harder. She half expects a swinging funeral procession to come by, but possibly midnight is not the most likely time for that kind of thing. The cemetery is as silent, as a bunch of graves is supposed to be. No vampires or any other creatures of the night to be seen.

She drops down lightly from her perch and starts walking. If you were an insane vampire with a Spike-fetish, where would you be? Answer: the biggest gaudiest tomb you could find. Possibly smack in the middle. Faith walks softly along the grassy lanes. It really is silent here. Shouldn’t there be birds, or crickets, or at least mosquitoes? The moist darkness presses in on her and gives no clue as to where she is or where she should be going. It’s hard to aim for the center of the graveyard, because she’s too short to be sure she’s going in the right direction.

After the tenth almost identical intersection she gets smart and hops onto the biggest mausoleum in sight. She knew it. The center is more to the left than she’s been going. She tries to get some kind of idea how the fucking place is laid out but the silence and darkness act like a blanket, muffling her senses until it’s like she’s in a black and white movie with the sound off. And wouldn’t you know it, right then the moon rises over the inky ruffle of trees standing guard over the graves. The moon’s fat face spotlights the wings of the biggest angel she’s ever seen, and there’s no such thing as coincidence. Right. No more plodding over the neat paths. She’s gonna go like her prey would, from tomb-top to tomb-top. She aims for the sloping roof of the mini-mansion across the path and jumps.

“Shit.” 

She’s forgotten her skirt. It tears a little from the spread of her thighs.  Her flip-flops slide off the roof and she has to scrabble with hands and feet not to hit the ground with her butt Great. Why couldn’t they have made Vampire Slayers with a built-in stealth option? If Droodzilla is here, she’s heard her coming by now. But then, so has Spike. He could shake off the evil vampiress and meet her in slow motion, like in a shampoo ad. 

Faith tucks the skirt into her low-rise boy shorts and the flip-flops too. See? Femininity is pointless, just like she’d always figured it was. Even Buffy had gone in for practical clothes in the end. Although in her case it had probably meant ongoing depression, together with the loss of appetite. Faith could use some of that. That shrimp and sausage soup, or whatever, is sloshing around in her stomach. It’s probably specially designed to disable Slayers. Fucks up their balance. 

Okay, her next jump had better be soundless, or she might as well have arrived with arc lights and a cherrypicker. And with all this time she’s lost tucking her flapping femininity back in, she could have crawled to the center of the cemetery by now. Off she goes.

She lands with the softest of thunks on the next series of tomb tops and halts to check her progress after the fifth or so. The shiny angel’s wings are very close now. The moon hides behind a thick cloud and it takes Faith a few seconds to get her night sight back.

She suppresses the urge to rub her eyes, because suddenly everywhere she looks there are vampires. She’s completely surrounded. Their yellow eyes glint at her from every tomb and mausoleum or the simpler raised gravestones. Fuck. She may be hot shit as a fighter, but fifty vampires? The first one on her right, only twenty feet away - and how the hell could she have missed it? – steps forward menacingly. Faith has a split second to debate with herself – waste one of her stakes on him or run? 

She runs. It’s hell on the old pride, but she’s got stuff to live for. She’ll be back to kill them all. How the fuck did they creep up on her like that? She never misses a vampire, let alone fifty. They must have some awesome tricks in their bags. In about three seconds flat she’s back at the cemetery wall, teetering on the rim before she lands on her motorcycle. That cemetery is way smaller on the way back.

“Get going, junior!”  She yells at her demonic escort, who’s deep into a funny cigarette and slow to react. It costs her a few precious moments to get her flip-flops back on. Her boots, anything for her boots right now. She looks back at the cemetery before she roars off and almost kills the engine in shock. Two figures are silhouetted against the moonlit sky, balancing easily on the wall above her. One of them is Spike, who she’d recognize if she was blindfolded, bound and gagged and being drowned in a sewer. His coat hangs heavy and sleek off his shoulders, and the woman who holds his hand is the one from the photograph; tall and bony, with an almost identical droopy white lace dress. Her yellow snake’s eyes glow at Faith with evil intensity, and she has to force herself to look away. Spike slides off his vampire mask as he looks at her, but he doesn’t speak, and Drusilla is still holding his hand. 

Faith drives off after the red taillight winking in the distance. Young pothead wasted no time once he saw Frankenstein’s bride and groom standing on the wall, fuck him. It’s gotta be that Spike is keeping Drusilla occupied so Faith can go and kill her. Gotta be. He wouldn’t break up with her over her little freak-out early this morning, would he? That’s not like Spike. Spike loves her and is loyal to the people he loves. 

Yeah, right, a little voice tells her, sniggering. He was loyal to Drusilla for a hundred years. He was loyal to Buffy, and to Dawn, especially with his dick. Why would he be loyal to you? 

Back at the now empty café, it’s only stubbornness that keeps Faith upright and demanding a place to stay. On the inside she’s like a baby, ready to bawl her stupid heart out. And the damn thing is, the person on whose chest she’d like to bawl is the guy who makes her feel this way. The first one who ever has, ‘cause even at twelve Faith was too smart to believe her foster father when he said he’d love her forever if she’d do this one little thing for him. It was little alright.

The proprietor is smooth as butter about this. Meaning, Faith thinks, that he still expects to get something out of her. Hey, and here it comes. 

“With the proviso that you keep this block free of vampires. Except the ones who belong to our side.”

Faith is weaving on her feet, but she gets most of it. “And how will I know your fangy buddies from your average stakeable variety?” 

He gestures to the vampires standing next to him. “These are Buddy Joe, Oscar and Franco. I’ll tell the other ones to stay away from you until I’ve had a chance to introduce them.” 

“Good,” Faith says. “Coz I got limited memory space for vampires. I usually just kill them.”

“Yeah, right,” one of the vampires sneers, Oscar, she thinks. “Unless they’re named William the Bloody. We know all about you, Buffy Summers.”

Oh, Christ. Faith doesn’t know if she should stake him right now or pee herself laughing.

“You know my rep, then. Killed thousands of your homies, and you could be a thousand and one? How ‘bout it, huh?”

The proprietor quells the vampire’s answer with a look. “Come along, mademoiselle. There’s a beautiful apartment in back, and it can be all yours as long as you work with us.”

Faith follows him through the café and to the other end of a courtyard at the back. It looks a thousand years old, stone and wood and wrought iron. Frosty cool. The proprietor precedes her into the gloomy interior of the house. It's stiflingly hot inside; don't they know about AC? Up the stairs, into the awesome apartment with wooden floors and shutters and tiny old furniture. Faith had better not sit on it, she thinks. The touch of her white trash butt would disintegrate all the pretty wood and ticking into nothing.. “Good night, Miss Summers.”

He thinks she’s Buffy too? Oh, what the hell, why bother to correct the mistake? Faith is the only The Slayer, anyway. “Wait. What’s the drawback?”

“There’s no…” Faith’s hand closes briefly on his windpipe. It’s enough to convince him. “There’s a ghost. Feel free to kill or make it go away. It’s lost me a fortune in rent already.”

A ghost, huh? In her present state of extreme tiredness she doesn't give a flying fuck about the ghost. What can it do to her, anyway, frighten her to death? A Slayer doesn't frighten that easily. A Faith doesn’t frighten that easily. At last he leaves her alone and Faith plunks down her bag. First thing’s first. The bathroom is huge and funny, with a bath in the middle of the floor and no shower. The flowery wallpaper has clearly been there for a gazillion years, but she still likes it. She peels off her ripped skirt and sweaty top and climbs in the tub. It booms hollowly under her footsteps. What the hell is it made of? She turns on the taps and mixes until the water’s lukewarm. This is great.

But the moment she lies back, planning to enjoy the relative coolness of the water, the memory of Spike standing on the cemetery wall comes crashing back into her brain. It can't be true that Spike's back with Drusilla. For one thing, he has a soul, and the other thing is that he's supposed to love her. He's said so, right? There wasn’t gonna be a repeat of the Dawn thing, he promised. She can reassure herself all she wants, but something inside her has already decided that it's no good. She cries silently into the bath water. Nobody can know that Faith the vampire slayer is having a blubbery fit all by herself. She fiercely knuckles her eyes. She's not gonna take this lying down, no way. That skank Drusilla is gonna get a stake through her bony ribcage, wielded by yours truly here in the bath tub

The thing is that she needs help. She’s not up to fifty vampires, and she doesn’t want to call any of her Cleveland pals. Kennedy and Morgan would be down here like a shot if she asked them, she just knows they'd be thrilled to be able to help her. But she can’t do it. They’ve seen her cry and wrestle with a two-timing boyfriend once, she’s not gonna involve them twice. She wants them to think of her as Faith who happily rode off into the sunset with her man, not like the sad failure she really is.

Faith picks at the thought of seeking help while she towels off and crawls into the huge iron bed. There's no point in asking the café owner. He's happy to make use of her, but her guess is that he won't actively pitch in. And then she's got it. Who's seen her at her lowest? Who knows all about her pathetic, sniveling little moments? She's sure she's seen a phone in the hallway. She climbs out of bed and paddles over there. Her feet make soft, slapping sounds on the bare boards.

"Hello?" the familiar voice says. Faith knees shake in relief and she sinks down on the floor. Not even the thought of getting splinters in her butt can persuade her stupid legs to get back up.

"Angel? It's Faith. I need help."

"Tell me all about it, Faithy."

Instead of words a sob pushes past the great big thick frog in Faith’s throat. She doesn’t even know where to start. What does Angel know about her and Spike? About Buffy? He must know Buffy’s dead, but who would have told him about Faith’s stay in Cleveland? Giles and Dawn were never Angel’s friends, and she guesses neither were Willow and Xander

She stammers out disjointed phrases about a date gone wrong and Drusilla. The quality of the attentive silence at the other end changes.

“Dru? Now isn’t that interesting! Faith, say no more. Daddy’s flying straight over to help you out. Go get some sleep, okay? What was your address again?”

Tiredness crashed down on Faith like blackout curtains and she barely makes it to the bed before she falls asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd. Thanks hon!

Spike is kneeling over her. He doesn't halt his deep thrusting as he clasps her wrists in one big hand and pushes them over her head. Faith’s body is bent, tense as a bow and quivering with strain. She receives him with her pelvis tilted, then undulates up and after him as he pulls back. She’s sweating, oozing stinging rivulets of salt from every pore, almost to the point of pain.

“Pain is pleasure, baby,” Spike growls, but his voice sounds odd. Faith blinks her eyes clear and sees that she’s mistaken. It’s not Spike but Angel riding her with harsh hard strokes, his greater weight now crushing her body. The bones in her wrists are grating together but there’s more to it than just physical discomfort. Angel’s not supposed to fuck her. He’s, like, her friend. Her confidant. It’s just plain wrong to do this and yet there’s a sickening, sweet satisfaction that she wishes she didn’t feel, but she does. It’s a line she’s wanted to cross before but he wouldn’t. The shame she feels at betraying Spike is making it hotter and better and she writhes in utter arousal from the pain and the wrongness. 

Angel removes his hands from her broken wrists and puts them on her neck. “Sorry Faithy,” he says, “but no one is supposed to know about this. You understand, don’t you?"

He turns up the pressure and Faith lets him for a long time, because she’s been bad. Because if Angel does it he must be right. But it hurts and she can’t breathe and there are black spots before her eyes. She tries to say something and the look on his face is terrible, so gloating and happy that she punches through her submission and finds her anger.

Maybe she’s nothing, maybe she’s worth a death like this, but the hell she’s gonna let him do this without explanation. And Spike wouldn’t like finding her fucked to death, would he? She owes him a lot more than that.

She tries to buck Angel off, but his huge cock is firmly in place inside her, where he’s still stirring up feelings that don’t fit in with being strangled. Funny, actually, that he isn’t biting her. Huh. With a mighty wrench, so violently she probably pulled a muscle, she manages to roll them both off the bed. She ends up on top, which makes her feel a little bit better. Her hands are free, and she uses them to pop his eyes out. It’s easier than she imagined and she feels nothing when she sees the shiny marbled things hanging from empty sockets by thin red threads ~~.~~

Angel goes on doing his thing. Faith breaks his nose. Rips out his tongue, his liver, finally his heart, but he still goes on. That can’t be right. He’s a vampire; he’s so supposed to dust, for Chrissake! Something’s off. Faith blinks harder. There's too much sweat in her eyes. Or no, it’s not sweat, they’re still shut. She thought she was looking at Angel, but she’s not. She’s seeing him while her eyes are closed. What is she seeing? She’s floating under water and she rolls back to her earlier position in the bed, supine, the soft old mattress denting deeply beneath her weight. This can’t be happening.

The ghost. It’s the ghost? She punches her fist through Angel's miraculously healed ribcage and there’s just the faintest lag in what she should be feeling. The crunch of ribs, the glutinous sucking of lungs and bloody tissue is just a tiny beat off. She has to open her eyes. 

As though through a thick mist she sees a thin, nebulous being crouching on her chest. It’s a sexless, elongated thing. Thank God she’s not really fucking it. That would be beyond gross. While she thinks that, it grows a schlong the size of a cucumber and threateningly moves it towards her cunt.

Even though there’s a sheet between her and the creature Faith has no intention of letting that happen. She gets her hands around its throat and starts squeezing. The creature grins, does an Exorcist with its oddly vague, incomplete head and disappears.

Faith is now completely awake. Her throat feels normal and unhurt beneath her careful fingers. It was all in her brain? Well, everything except her own arousal. Her body tingles and throbs as if she's actually been having sex. The thing, ghost or whatever did a mindfuck on her, but it sure dug up some dirt from her brain. Yuck. She really doesn’t want to think about Angel like that. Because it would be wrong. Because Angel belongs to Buffy. But then, so did Spike. She decides to stop thinking about it, because it’s not getting her anywhere she wants to be. 

She puts on fresh clothes from her bag, because it feels like a defense against the creepy ghost thing for some reason. With her knife ready she goes and turns on every light in the apartment. There's not a trace of anything living, unless you count the dust bunnies and mice droppings. Great. 

Getting back to sleep is out of the question. She has no clue how to kill the thing, if it can be killed, and she gets why there’s not a lot of takers for the apartment. She'll have to call Cleveland after all, ask Morgan for hints about killing it. Tomorrow.

She finds her cigarettes and discovers she doesn’t have to lean out of a window; there’s an actual balcony, overlooking a wilderness which glows vaguely green under the violet gray night sky. She sees walls here and there, and there’s a heck of a lot blooms for a wilderness, so probably this was another walled garden long ago. 

Faith leans on the balcony, enjoying the warm air on her bare skin and smokes. She hasn’t had enough sleep by a long stretch, so as soon as it’s light out she’s gonna hop on the bike and get to a motel Six or something. No, fuck, she has to wait here for Angel. 

She flops back down on the bed, still smoking, since she’s belatedly realized there’s no one to stop her smoking indoors. Her hand slides down over her belly. Spike should be here. She’s in the mood for a nice hard and fast fuck. She hasn’t had any in like 48 hours or so, which is a first. Her lips are still slick and swollen from her fairly gross dream experience, and it takes only a few swipes over her clit to make her tingle all over, slowly now, gently, making herself wait that extra second on that impossible brink of electric joy and then, bam, she’s shaking and shivering all over, zinging bolts of pleasure shooting over her body. She can see all the little hairs on her arms and legs stand up and say hallelujah. That was good. How she wishes that Spike would hoist her up on her knees right now and fuck her till she sees stars. Maybe she’d better dig her vibe out of her bags. It’s gonna be a long wait, otherwise.

She’s dipping her fingers into her pussy for another go when the phone rings. That’s gotta be Angel. No, can’t be. It’s too soon. He can’t call from the airplane. She stumbles over to the cutesy telephone table and lifts the heavy black receiver.

“Hello?”  Her voice is as hoarse if someone had really been choking the life out of her.

“Who’s this?” an English voice says. “I’m sorry to intrude on your privacy, but I’m on the trail of a dangerous criminal, and this is the last number he received a call from.”

“Wesley! Don’t your recognize my voice? It’s me, Faith!”

“Faith?”

There’s a silence. It’s the silence of a Watcher grudgingly rearranging the facts in his head until they match reality once more. Faith smiles. She likes the way some things never change, like Angel being his caring self and Wesley wanting to be the man who has the facts. Leather jackets and beard stubble haven’t changed that at all.

“Why were you calling Angel?” he says suspiciously.

Faith has no idea what has gotten into him. She sighs. “I needed his help, Wes. I’ve got a bad sitch here and I couldn’t hack it alone.”

More baffled silence. Faith pictures Wesley rubbing his bad shave or scratching his head. No, he wouldn’t do that. He’ll look accusing. It’s the world’s fault that it’s not the way he wants it, not the other way around.

“And what did he say?”

“Well, he was frosty cool and he’s flying down here even as we speak. I guess. Don’t know the flight schedule to N.O.”

Wesley’s voice climbs an octave higher. “Faith! You didn’t give him your address, did you?”

“Duh? How else would he find me?”

“Faith, move away from there right now. Get dressed, don’t pack, just run and check into a motel. Be anywhere but there.”

Well, hell, how does he know she’s bare assed and everything? Is there a webcam here? Faith looks up at the ceiling, but it’s so high that the small lamp doesn’t illuminate its shadowy recesses.

“Faith! Answer me!”

“Wes, man, what are you getting all hepped up about? What’s cooking, dude?”

“Don’t call me dude. You didn’t speak to Angel, Faith. You spoke to Angelus.”

“Jesus Christ! He lost his soul again? Don’t you guys ever pay attention?”

“Yees…” Wesley says hesitantly. “Now that you mention it, he did lose it last year, didn’t he? I’d forgotten.”

Faith has no words. Wes forgot Angel lost his soul last year? “Did you also forget you broke me out of prison to capture Angelus so you could mojo the soul back?”

“Of course not,” Wesley says quickly, but Faith knows he’s lying.

“Spill, Wes, spill! What happened this time? He got happy? You let another juju man take it out?”

“No. He was tricked into drinking a potion from the Holy Grail.”

“Right. I don’t know what the fuck that is, but I do know you’re being pretty fucking careless with Angel’s damn soul.”

“I’ve got an address for you, Faith. The nearest Motel 6. Follow my instructions. I’ll be joining you as soon as I can.”

“Okay,” Faith says, not very enthusiastically. “Are Cordy and Connor, and um, Fred and Charlie Gunn gonna be along too?”

“Charles is dead. Fred is no more. Who’s Connor?”

Oh, wow. This was getting weirder and weirder. Sounds like Wesley’s the one needing help and not the other way around. Usual thing, really. Nobody wants Faith around permanently, but when the going gets hot, they get her going. Coz she’s the hottest fighter they’ve got. And hey, he didn't mention what happened to Cordelia. Now that's not Faith's favorite cheerleader, but she promises herself she's gonna bug him about it when she sees him in person.

“Are you sure there’s flights leaving in the middle of the night?”

“Not for me, no. I might catch the 8:35. But Angelus is using the company jet.”

"Angelus has a jet? And a company? Man, things have gotten weird out there. Okay, Wes. See you at, what, six?”

“Wait for me, Faith. It’s not safe to go prowling around Angelus. Don’t leave, especially at night. We have no idea where Angelus is or what he wants.”

Fuck that, at least she remembers how dangerous Angelus is, unlike Wes with his suspicious memory loss. “I know what he wants,” Faith says mulishly. “He’s coming over to help me find Spike. Dru’s got him.”

“Drusilla? Why didn’t you say so before? If those two get together, there’s no telling what will happen!”

Wes ends the call. Faith puts down the phone thoughtfully. Drusilla and Angelus, huh? Isn’t she his daughter? Well, not that that would deter an evil vampire. But it would be a hell of a good thing if he was distracting Dru, so she can get her vampire away from his Mommy Dearest. Thanks, Angel. Angelus. And she’s not so sure if she’s gonna follow Wesley’s advice. She’s gonna be there when Angelus finds his Dru.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and malena- thanks for the great line!

Faith hoists her bags into the bike's luggage box and walks the bike to the exit. There isn't a sound or a peep of light from the demons she'd assumed were living in the rest of the house. Funny. She'd always kind of thought demons were nocturnal. Well, maybe not if they’re trying to pass for human. She takes care not to start the bike until she's well away from the building. It’s good to see if this busy little street gets quiet before dawn. Ugh, she hates that word. Sunup, she means, or sunrise. She's gotta train herself to think of it like that.

She circles back through the narrow streets until she's back where she came from, only a hundred yards south instead of north. She sidles the bike into a narrow alley and waits. After all, who says Wesley Windbag-Pryce is telling the truth? His memory is wonky, and he sounds too much like the guy she knew in Sunnydale, not like the dangerous bitter man she last met. It's about an hour before…sunrise, she guesses, so there's still time for Angelus or Angel to arrive here.

She's cut it closer than she thought. Within ten minutes a limo draws up before the Moulin Noir. A tall bulky figure climbs out and waits while the driver gets his bags. Very classy, Faith has to admit. What happened to the old Angel with his skin-flinty ways? The limo zooms off noiselessly and Faith watches Angel make a slow circle. His head is up and she imagines she can hear him sniff like a Black Rider. She pulls her face back into theshadow of the building and waits until the count of sixty. Very carefully she peeks out again. Angelus is standing stock still with his face in her direction. Faith freezes.

She doesn’t even breathe or blink and it seems like minutes but it can’t be. Slowly Angelus lifts his hand and waves it at her. “You won’t get off that easily this time!” he yells.

Fuck.

Faith’s heart pounds so hard he must be able to hear it. Angelus is scarier at a hundred yards than a ghost sitting right on top of your belly. She wants to think, weigh options, but her breath is shrilling in her throat and she starts the bike with shaking hands and drives off. Fuckity fuckity fuck. She can’t believe he knew she was there. It’s impossible. Even a vampire can’t smell that much. Should she have stayed downwind of him? She doesn’t even know what that is.

She has her eyes on her rearview mirrors every two seconds until she remembers she wouldn’t be able to see Angel in them anyway. She risks looking back, just in case he’s running behind her at vampire speed, but he isn’t. Spike says vampires can only do that for a couple of minutes, but what if Angel can? And he just doesn’t need to? Maybe he already knows where Dru and Spike are holed up, from the old days when they used to hang out here together.

Faith hopes that that is the kind of thing Wesley knows. When and where Angelus and his pals were together here. 

It’s already light when she finds the motel. Getting off the bike is surprisingly hard. Her hands and thighs shake. That is not on. Faith doesn’t do scared. She faced down Angelus before, not a tremor not a quiver. What the fuck is going on? She’s not going to pay attention to this weird phenomenon. It could be the humidity, you know?

When she wants to register the clerk tells her there’s a room reserved for her, and it’s already been paid too. Huh. So if Wesley happens to be a vamp and he paid for her room, does that mean he wouldn’t need an invite? She’s kind of pissed at herself for not knowing that. She could have used Spike to find out all that stuff. Put it on the Internet for other Slayers and all that, like Morgan and Kennedy wanted her to. Okay, so they were right.

The room is spacious and impressively decorated; thick carpet, real chairs and a clanking AC. She plops down on the fancy bedspread and tells herself she’s going to sleep. This does not work. Instead, her mind keeps returning to that moment Angelus caught her eye, and the way her heart rate has been up ever since. He throat is dry and she’s looping and looping and it’s driving her nuts. She just can’t be afraid. She’s never been afraid before. What’s changed? She’s better than ever, faster, stronger. Spike’s been training her and feeding her up and…

Spike's name drops into her stomach with a heavy thunk. The realization is like lead - heavy, smooth, bitter. Poisonous. Spike’s the thing that’s changed. Spike’s who gave her incentive to look further than the next minute, the next hour. Now she wants to survive the fight, not just win it. Which is gonna make it harder to win, she’s not stupid. Her face gets all hot and scrunchy and she hides it in the scratchy hotel pillow. Her ribs buck and heave but she's not crying, definitely not.

After a while, Faith gets up and takes a cold shower, which feels great on her flushed face and stinging eyes. It’s blindingly bright outside, and the heat is steadily kicking up notch by notch. Knowing that it’s Spike who’s making her a worse Slayer instead of a better one doesn’t change one fucking thing. She’s still gonna pick him over twenty golden Slayer awards, but the point is that it’s dangerous. Dangerous for Spike.  And maybe that’s why he left. Maybe he got sick of this lovesick millstone hanging around his neck and cramping his style.

His vampire Mom doesn’t have that problem, she guesses. Can vampires without souls love? Spike never talks about the details of what happened between him and Buffy before he got the soul, but things were hot and heavy, she’s gathered that much.

                                                         *** 

Spike is kissing Drusilla, grinding her against a crypt, and Faith dances around them, trying to find an angle to stake her without dusting Spike. Turn, Spike, turn, she yells, but her mouth doesn't make a sound. Thunder rolls in the distance.

"Faith?"

Faith jerks awake, awash in sweat on top of the slippery hotel covers. She rolls off the bed and stumbles to the door. Maybe she should just give up on sleep. Nasty things happen while she sleeps, and if you're a Slayer you can never be sure it's just a dream. Could be prophetic, knock on wood, cross your fingers, etcetera. 

The doorknob rattles and someone pounds it so hard that the wood shimmies. 

"Who's there," Faith says cautiously, stake ready.

"It's me, Faith, Wesley."

Faith opens the door, steps back and waits. Wesley looks puzzled. 

"Ah. Very sensible, Faith."

He steps over the threshold. And crowds her personal space with a dark, boring look into her eyes. "Didn’t you know this doesn’t work for public places? I could still have killed you."

Faith looks ostentatiously down, where a stake is poised right over his heart.

"Well done, Faith. I'm glad to see you haven’t lost your skills."

Faith rolls her eyes. "My skills were good enough for the Hellmouth in Cleveland, Wes. Not really necessary to test them. Since you're not my Watcher anymore."

Wesley winces. "I know. My apologies."

Up close he's as subtly off as on the phone. He's Wesley, no doubt about that. His shave is at least a few days old and his clothes are casual but elegant, all things she remembers from last time they met. His voice is less rough, and his manner less confident than she remembers, just a tiny difference.

She crosses her arms. How safe is it gonna be to go into a full-out battle with fifty – no, make that fifty-one – vampires with a podner who lost his memory.

“Tell me, Wes, what do you remember about the last time we met?” 

“Really, Faith, do we have to do this now?” Wesley says, 007-brow raised.

“Yep, we do.”

“Why?”

“Because I think your memory is wonky, and that makes me nervous.”

“My memory is perfectly all right.”

“So spill already.”

“The last time we met, Faith, we…it was in…at the occasion of…”

Wesley shuts his mouth and stares at her with that threatening frown that she now realizes has more to do with how Wesley feels than disapproval. 

“See? I knew we had to talk about this.”

“About what, Faith?”

“Fuck that. Someone fucked with your fucking memory, Wes, just take it from me. Check in with me for the real facts before you make decisions, right?”

Faith plops down on the bed and stretches. Wesley regards her with disapproval. The real stuff this time. Well, he can just go fuck himself or fight Angelus on his own.

“Okay, Wes, hand me the Orpheus and the syringe.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Wesley, I know you brought along a nasty poison to shoot me up with so Angelus goes all visiting of the past while I nearly die. That won’t work this time, 'cause of the memory problem we established you have, and because Angelus might not have that memory problem. In fact, when I saw him this morning, I got the impression he remembered exactly how we met last time. In his own head, you know.”

Wesley looks dazed. Faith gets tired from the thought alone of having to tell him this again. And again every five minutes.

She gets a piece of hotel stationery and writes something down. “I Wesley Wyndam-Pryce accept that my memory is fucked up by a spell”, she writes. “I will accept that Faith tells the truth.”

“That’s for you.”

He stares at it. “I don’t understand.”

“Wesley. Were you surprised to see me out of prison?”

“No….”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m…I….”

“Exactly. Did you come here to rat me out?”

“Erm, no. I agree that there’s something odd, here, Faith. I’m not exactly stupid. There’s just…what did you say happened?”

“I dunno exactly either, Wes. Last time we met you sprung me from jail. Together we captured Angelus, who’s lost his soul due to, I don’t remember exactly, a goofy idea of yours. You needed his help against a world-destroying monster.”

“I see his silhouette,” Wesley says abruptly. “He’s – no, he’s gone. A giant horned demon, right?”

Faith shrugs. “I never saw him.” 

She turns on her stomach and regards Wesley seriously.” So let’s cut the crap. How did he lose it this time, and what measures are you taking to see he doesn’t lose it again?”

Wesley smiles faintly. “You have changed, Faith.”

“Knew that. Point, Wes.”

Wesley looks around and perches prissily on one of the fancy hotel chairs, like they might tarnish his British butt or something. To her, this is a pricey hotel. To him, it’s a dive. Faith wonders what Spike thinks about stuff like that. She has the uneasy feeling he might agree with Wes. She promises herself that after she rescues Spike and gets the whole Drusilla/Angelus thing sewn up, they will live in the apartment she stayed in last night. Give Spike the surroundings he reserves. Oh, hey, and Wes will know something to help her with the dream sucker ghost. Cool. Back to the present.

“I didn’t realize Angel had lost his soul for the second time in a year, or I might have reacted differently,” Wes says. 

Faith holds out her hand. Wesley gets the familiar Orpheus tools from his bag and hands them to her, slowly and reluctantly. Never again. She stuffs them in her slaying satchel. Never again, but never say never, coz you might find yourself in a toupé with Kim Basinger by your side.

She shudders and catches Wes’ eyes on her cleavage. She represses her grin and works it a little more. Bad, bad, Wes.  Watchers are not supposed to ogle their Slayers. She knew that, though. He’s always had this icky little suppressed thing going for her. He can just shove that little thing where the sun don’t shine, because she’s got her man and the whole Watcher thing doesn’t appeal, even if he looks way better than before.

“I mean, Wes, did you call Willow already? And ask her to do a better, more permanent job this time?”

Wesley winces. “I can’t keep calling Willow to do my work for me, can I?”

Faith just raises a brow. Now she’s the one doing the 007 thing. No reason 007 can’t be a girl, right?

“What are we gonna do? Are we gonna stake him or what?”

Wesley blanches. “We must take that possibility into account,” he says heavily. 

"Damn right we should. Vampires get frisky, we dust 'em."

The thought of staking Angel makes Faith feel queasy, and the thought of staking Spike she doesn’t even consider for one second.

"Hey, Drusilla doesn't have a soul or anything special, does she? No reason not to stake her?"

"None," Wesley nods. 

"Good. Let's saddle up and go then."

Faith picks up the bike keys and her Slayer satchel, heavy with stakes, knives, holy water and a small axe.

"Why don't we go together?” Wesley says. "I rented a car."

Faith weighs this option seriously. Thing is, she's not that sure she's gonna come out of this and have time to wait for Wesley. An intact Spike is more important to her than an intact Watcher. 

"Nah. I'm taking the bike. That'll be better for a quick getaway," she says.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd

Wesley follows Faith to her bike.

“It’s still light, Faith. They’re vampires. Most of NO is under sea level, so no tunnels. They’ll still be hiding out.”

Faith shrugs. “Just needed to see you in sunlight, Wes."

Wesley bristles in a very old-fashioned way. “Really, Faith, I see no reason for this attitude,” he says, his voice low and slow, but the words vintage Wes. One more confirmation that some of his fucking screws are loose. Faith fishes out the paper she had him sign and holds it up in front of his face.

Wesley reads it and flushes. “Yes. Well. I remember signing this.  Are you positive there’s something wrong with me and not with you? I feel quite normal.”

Faith rolls her eyes. “Believe me, you’re not. You’re acting like you were never this totally cool, tough guy I took down Angelus with. I wish you did remember.”

“I was cool and tough?” His hand goes to the place where he doesn’t wear a tie anymore. “I knew that.”

“No, you didn’t. Okay, I’m taking the bike, you follow me.”

“It makes more sense to take the car together,” Wesley objects.

“You want me to spell it out for ya, Wes? I don’t wanna be caught without transportation when you fuck up.”

Finally, that silences him. Faith’s this close to taking off without him. He’s so not the guy she wants at her back right now; he’s all kinds of vulnerable this way. The good thing is that he reminds her so much of asshole Wes from Sunnydale that Angelus won’t be using him as leverage. In fact, Angelus is welcome to eat him for dinner.

Faith only loses her way once as she drives to the cemetery. She doesn’t check her mirrors if Wesley is following, but the burble of his rented car’s engine is never far behind her.

She parks around the corner from the entrance and waits for Wes. 

“This is the cemetery?” Wesley whispers. “Where’s the lair?”

“I don’t know! I told ya, I had to run for it. They had at least fifty minions.”

“What’s the plan, then?”

“Wesley!”

Shit. No need to tell her she’s dumb. The minute a Watcher type turns up she just lays back and waits to be led. She should really be over that by now. Okay. She’ll make the plan. She can do that.

“We go back for weapons. We need the big stuff, grenades, flame throwers.”

She’s on her way when Wesley grabs her arm and hauls her back. “I’ve got all those in my boot.”

Faith loses only a few seconds checking out his sturdy shoes before she realizes what he means. “Let’s go get it.”

“Faith, we need a better plan than storming in and killing everyone. For one thing, I don’t want Angelus to be killed; with the soul back he'll be perfectly all right again.”

Wes is right. Faith shivers when she realizes how close she came to incinerating Spike.

“And secondly, I do think the city Fire Department might notice a few hand grenades, don’t you agree?”

Aw, hell. Yes, of course she agrees. So now what? Planning is such a drag. Better to take out those vamps one at a time than spend all night thinking up strategies. Hey, that actually is a plan.

“Why don’t we go catch us a coupla vamps and kill them? Attrition, baby!”

“Why not catch us a vamp and interrogate it? It could tell us where Drusilla’s lair is.” Wesley counters.

Fine. Faith shrugs. 

While she turns away, Wesley suddenly crumples and before she can react she's enveloped in a shroud of cool leather and flying through the air. It's Spike's coat, she smells his unique scent, whiskey, smoke, hot metal. She lets it happen. She trusts him. 

But when she relaxes in his hold she realizes the body she leans against is too heavy, too well padded to be Spike's. It’s just like her dream. She panics, wants to fight her way out of the leather cocoon but her arms are pinned against her side and she can’t move. It's hard to breathe. 

"Angel!" she squeaks. "Let me go!"

The only answer is a contemptuous silence. She's loosened from her leather prison and flung through the air in pitch darkness. She throws her arms up in front of her and is just in time to break her wrists and then her head on the hard stone she encounters. Someone screams in a voice that sounds like her own. A heavy foot grinds the fragile bones of her hands together and she blacks out mercifully.

                                                           *

Faith wakes up with a jolt. The shock travels through her neck and arms and causes exquisite pains in her broken hands and wounded head. She screams.

"Nice one, Faithy," an amused voice says. It's dark, but she can picture the accompanying grin only too well.

"Want me to hold your hand? Shall I kiss it better?"

"Noo!" she starts, but the word changes into a wail of pain as he skillfully applies pressure to the sorest point in her left hand. She writhes in pain, but that makes it worse. Screaming is less painful, but she doesn't want to give Angelus the satisfaction.

"It's only pain, Faith. Think what other things I could do to you! For starters, I could eat you. But you know, why be boring? Been there, done that. I've thought of a few things that ought to be more innovative."

He gets up and moves away. She has to think. Everything she does has to be thought through. To scream or not to scream, whatever is most effective at this point. Last time it was a physical fight, which she lost on purpose. Angelus is not going to go there again, she guesses. What does he know about her and Spike? What did she say when she asked for help? Or would he know about them anyway, via Giles and Wesley, or Willow, or any of the Scoobies? If he does know, the next thing she’s gonna see is Spike hanging upside down from the ceiling, being tortured and whatnot to make her suffer. 

No, wait, she’s not thinking right. What does Angelus want? It can’t be that his only goal is playing with a Slayer. He wants more. Drusilla, maybe. But he must have her already. Fuck, she should have asked Wesley more questions. It’s her own dumb fault that she's started doing the acting before thinking thing again. She and Wesley have been behaving like amateurs, just going in unprepared. Stupid.

Faith hears scraping, clanking sounds. She strains to determine where they’re coming from but doesn’t succeed. She's in a stone room; everything sounds hollow and it smells of stone and molds and dankness, but dank in a hot way. From the way the sounds echo it's a pretty big space; not in the cemetery anymore, then. 

The scraping stops and a light slowly grows. At first it only illuminates a stretch of blotchy concrete, but then one of the blotches gradually dissolves into the form of a human being hanging upside down. Wesley. Faith's body wants to let out a breath in huge relief but she holds it in until she feels like a pufferfish about to blow. Angelus can't know that she just doesn’t care about Wesley, at least not more than she would care about any other innocent guy hanging there. Fuck, a little more than that, okay, but it's not this big deal where she’d cry and stuff if he died.

Angelus looms high above her, his body swinging jauntily with every step. Every moment shows the difference between him and Angel; the one is all containment, control; the other looseness and glee. If he wasn’t such an evil fucker she’d probably like Angelus better.

"Whaddya say, Faith? Ready to talk to me now?"

Um, no. Never. And he may already know all that from the acid content of her sweat or other creepy details, but she’s never gonna say so.

"No way. Not gonna tell you anything."

What does he want to know? Are they on the same page here? She just wants to get Spike and head the hell out of here, but why would Angelus care? Does Angel know that Spike has a soul? Yeah, B must have told him.

“Aw, really, Faithy? After all we’ve meant to each other?”

Sounds of a heavy body settling down. "How about, say, Willow? I guess you and Willow were never close, am I right?"

He doesn't wait for confirmation. This is not the information he's after.

"So you wouldn't mind telling me where she is, would you Faith? I would really like to sit down with Willow and have a chat about old times. Willow and I go way back, you see. Never did anything to her either, if that's what you think. Only, you know, to her goldfish." Angelus coughs modestly.

If he wants to creep her out he's definitely succeeding. It's not so hard to guess why he wants Willow; so far she's the only person who's succeeded in resouling Angelus. Twice. With Willow out of the equation he'd own the world again. 

"I don't know where Willow is. And if I did, I wouldn't tell you," she says. 

From Angelus' pleased chuckle she guesses it's a bad idea to even talk to him.

A door clangs open on her left, bringing in a gust of better smelling air and a torch. Grass, flowers, smoke.

"Daddy? May I see the little girl? Pretty please? I've been ever so good and I want to play. I shall be Cat and she shall be Mouse."

The woman who's speaking is tall and skinny, dressed in a floppy, flowery old-fashioned dress. The anticipation in her voice and the pale pointed tongue snaking around her sharp white teeth are giving Faith a chill shiver deep inside.

"Come on, Dru, let's not disturb Angelus while he's working," Spike's voice rumbles. Faith knows he's standing ten feet away, but by an odd trick of acoustics it's as if he's only two inches from her. Her back arches in mindless response and she feels her hairs standing up all over her arms. She's glad she's wearing her hot constricting jeans; she wants all the layers she can get between her tender parts and Angelus prying voice and eyes. 

It doesn't help at all. Angelus’ delighted laugh rings out. "Willy, my boy! Whatever have you done to this Slayer? Don't tell me you've fallen for one of them again. I thought Buffy would have taught you the futility of loving a Slayer. The only thing they're good for is killing. After a nice bit of foreplay, of course." For emphasis he taps her left hand, not even hard, but Faith can't stop the moan from escaping.

Spike. Oh please, Spike, get her out of here.

"I know that, mate," Spike says evenly. "Learnt from you, didn't? Soften them up first, then kill 'em. Makes the fight so much more fun."

Of course he doesn't mean it. Of course. Faith trusts him completely. He's just here to get her out of Angelus' and Dru's clutches. They'll kill them both and be happy ever after. She should be able to be sure of him, now, shouldn't she? He chose her over Buffy and over Dawn. They're a team.

She doesn't know if it's the pain or the cold, or something else, but the starts crying. She bites her lips to keep the sobs inside, but she can’t help it. Her ribs heave and she gulps in air and hot bitter tears stream down her face. Crying is stupid, and even more so when you're tied up and wounded. She can’t even see the light of the torches anymore.

"Slayer tears," Angelus says, almost reverently, and his cold fingers scoop one up from where it hands on the edge of her jaw. "Hot. Salty. Just how I remember your blood tasting, Faith. Slayer blood is the most erotic, powerful thing you'll ever taste. Spike knows that. He killed two of them. But the ones I tasted he hasn't had yet, has he? Because the way Buffy slid down my throat, man, that was truly magnificent. A Slayer at the peak of her prowess. Can't remember if it was better to drink her down or to take her virginity. Huh. You ever take a Slayer's virginity, Spike?"

"Don't share your taste for novelty, Ange. Like a woman to know what she's doing."

Faith can't tell what Spike is thinking. She has no sense of what he means to her anymore. Did he just defend her in a roundabout way, or not? Probably not.

Chill fingers touch her face. The nails are long and pointy and she guesses they're not Angelus'. Drusilla. She wishes she knew more about her. On the other hand, a vampire is a vampire. She'll kill her if she can. Immediately after that defiant decision doubt sets in. It's Spike's old girlfriend. What's he gonna think if she kills Drusilla? That she was jealous? Well, yeah. She is. Even so, he's never said he still loves her. He's never even mentioned her, actually. Still, she's not dumb enough to think that means he doesn't think of her. If she kills Drusilla, is he still gonna love her? Well, fuck that. She'll take that hurdle when she gets to it. First she needs to get out of here.

"What do you want, Spike? Faith and I are having a chat."

"Dru had a vision. Says the city's going to get flooded."

"The bodies are floating around…" Drusilla moans. "All their lovely blood going to waste. Can we go out and drink them before they die?"

"No," Angel says curtly. "I'm busy. Go and get her a few babies to eat, Spike."

"Don’t wish to go out with Spike. He's not my bad dog anymore. That nasty Slayer went and spoilt him like she did you. I want to go out with you, Daddy. I want to lick the yummy bloody from your fingers. I wish to drink it from your cupped hands just like you promised me.”

"When did I promise that, Dru? 1860? I'm busy. Go away."

Faith is a little relieved that Dru's apparently off Spike. Also, the reality of Dru's appearance is pretty reassuring. She may not be at all like this insane Goth princess, but then Buffy wasn't either. 

Dru's pale dress glows as she swishes in distress. "No Daddy! That nasty William is back, and he's angry with me because I gave him his glowy wings. If you are not to play with me, then you must return my Spike to me instead. You killed my darling girl, bad Daddy. You must give me my boy."

"Sure, I will. But not now, Dru!" Angelus says and grits his teeth. "Now I want you to go out and stay away until dawn."

"I shall take this one then. I can see his fear growing like tendrils in his tummy, all pretty and green.  
I think he likes me."

"Stay away from Wes, Dru. I need him first. You can have him when I'm done with him."

"Wesley!" she croaks.

She gets a hard cuff from Angelus on the mouth, but she's rewarded with a faint moan from another corner, behind her. Damn. She thinks she can probably get out on her own; her hands will heal quickly enough, but Wesley is a totally different matter. She wonders if she'll be able to fight her way out with a 180-pound guy slung over her back.

"Isn't that nice? Faith and her old Watcher. What would you like me to do, Faithy? Torture him, like you couldn't manage to finish properly way back when? Or have you repented so hard you've even managed to forgive him for the way he fucked you up? Because, tsk, tsk, tsk. Was he a bad watcher or was he a bad Watcher? I personally feel that your descent into evil was as much due to his mishandling you as it was to your inherently sleazy, evil nature."

He waits. Faith knows she should be stoic and not move a muscle or make a sound, but he's lanced straight into an old boil and she's crying in rage and shame again. She never cries, fuck him. She hopes Spike will still respect her now that he knows this. She's always thought he likes strong women. She can sense Spike’s presence, but there’s no signal from him, no movement at all. Cold fingers of uncertainty grab her low in the stomach. 

If she had balls they'd be shriveling.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd; with input from meko and ayinhara. Thanks guys!

“Will you get  out of here, Spike, and take Dru with you? Your goody-goody stare is making me nervous,” Angelus growled.

“Hey, got as much of a stake here as you, remember? Somebody cursed me with a soul, same as you. You’d know about wanting to get rid of it. Remember the way Darla treated you in Shanghai? Let me watch.”

Angelus sighed. “At least make yourself useful. I can't work with Dru whining to be walked and fed every three seconds. Tie her up or something and get me more light. I need the Slayer to see what I’m doing to Pryce.”

Faith waits for hours, although she knows they gotta be minutes. Angelus’ words are working. She’s starting to doubt if Spike is really only here to help her. He’s found Drusilla again, and if Angelus gets Wesley to cooperate he can desoul Spike. If Willow can long-distance desoul, she could resoul, but Faith hasn’t been in contact with Giles and Willow for months, not since she left Cleveland. Small hope, no, no hope at all they’re gonna notice she’s disappeared. Maybe she should have stayed. Her friends there would have been on it within hours. 

Spike returns with two new torches. No power here, she guesses Too bad for Angelus. He puts the torches in sconces on the walls, and while Faith miserably watches Angelus unhook Wesley’s upside-down form, she feels Spike getting closer to her.

What will he do? Talk to her? He puts his finger unerringly on the knife scar on her shoulder. The scar from the one and only time she ever managed to get him to drink from her. The idea doesn’t appeal at all now that she stands a big chance of losing all her blood in the near future, and she cringes away from him.

Angelus clangs with the heavy iron manacles and swears at Wesley for being so heavy.

“Wait for me, love,” Spike whispers, and for God’s sake, she’s about to cry again. There has been more crying in the past hour than there has been in her whole life so far.

But now she can handle everything. Her hands itch and tingle from her Slayer healing, strength courses through her veins. She’s Faith the Vampire Slayer, and even if it’s Angelus, she can hold her own against him. As long as Spike’s by her side there is nothing she cannot do. Even save Wesley. 

“Daddy, bad Spike’s touching the Slayer,” Drusilla’s thready whine cuts through her heroic violin-and- trumpets-thoughts. 

With a mighty heave Angelus slings Wesley’s manacled ankles over the big meat hook on the closer wall and turns to Spike and her.

“Tell me you’re good boy, Willy,” he says silkily and yanks Spike’s head by the curls, toward his mighty chest. 

“Sod off, Ange,” Spike says calmly. “Thought you wanted me to take more of an active part in torture?”

Angelus tosses Spike away from him like a rag doll. “Not now, you idiot. Not now you’ve got a soul. I can’t trust you. You can watch. And keep Dru away from me. Faith’s mine.”

Dru claps her hands. “Oooh! I like watching my Daddy kill things. For he does it so well. Nice and slow, don’t you Daddy?”

An indulgent, wistful smile plays over Angelus’ face or a second, but it’s chased away by a frown. “I’m a busy man, Dru. I’ve gotta find these Watchers and witches before they find me. Need to pay attention to hostage Watcher.” 

He starts humming “If I Were a Rich Man”, which seems completely inappropriate, but who knows what goes on in his mind? Faith’s spirits, just having risen a coupla inches, plummet right back into hopelessness. How will Spike be able to help her when he has two completely insane vampires to contend with?

“Daddy!”  Dru pouts. “I already have my boy. You just need to clean out his head. There are nasty nests and cobwebs in the pretty whorls of his brain, pretty as pink. I wish you would let me make him a bad dog again...  Look!”  She holds up a fingernail, blackened in a creepy parody of a French Manicure, an at least half an inch long. “I think that if I put this in his eye, the bad things would come seeping out like pus. Drip, drip, drip.”

“It’s a thought,” Angelus agrees absently as he tears off Wesley’s shirt. Next to Angel’s silk-clad bulk, Wesley looks slender and vulnerable. His skin is as white as Spike’s, English white, Faith guesses, with only a thin strip of dark hair running up to navel, like an exclamation mark. 

“Are your eyes open, Faithy?”  he asks, almost conversationally, as if his question means as little as his vague agreement with Dru.

Yes, they are. Faith decides she’d better shut them, but she’s too late. With the same casual ripping movement he used to tear off Wesley’s dark shirt, Angelus digs deep into Wesley’s chest and rips loose a slab of muscle, baring white ribs for a few seconds before they are obscured by a sheet of red.

Faith makes a strangled gasp, and her brain goes into overdrive, registering absolutely everything. Angelus’ red grin as he licks off his wet, glistening hands. Dru’s little tongue licking her wine-dark lips; she’s bouncing up and down, clapping her hands. Spike makes an abrupt movement with his hands, but stills it as quickly.

“See, Faithy? This is what people look like on the inside. All red and shiny. You know what I like most about this? Not the blood. Ha, that surprises you, doesn’t it? You thought the blood for sure? Let me show you what I really like.”

He lifts Faith off the bench she’s lying on. She realizes with a guilty start that only her hands and feet are bound; she’s not chained to the wall. She’d felt so heavy and captive when she woke up, and it wasn’t even the case. Angelus sets her down on her wobbly feet, and draws her tied hands  to Wesley’s bloody chest. Her face is close to his groin. She checks out Wesley’s face; it looks red and congested, but not conscious anymore. Thank God. The smell of blood and raw meat is overpowering, and also disgusting. Angelus pulls her hair up and she has to follow. Her nose is an inch away from Wesley’s ribs, just like raw spare ribs, and she can see his heart beating behind a thin membrane.

“You see now, Faith? How beautiful people are? They are like little treasure boxes. You can keep tearing off the wrapping paper and there’s so much to see and feel right up to the end.”

Angelus sighs and presses a broad fingertip against the fluttering membrane around Wesley’s’ heart. “And I have to apologize to you, Faith. I should have started with the skin.“ He **tusks** and shakes his head mournfully. "Here I am, ready to discuss the finer points of torture with a fellow connoisseur, a fellow enthusiast, and what do I do? I get carried away and skip that important step." He pauses and lifts an index finger that long adn unexpectedly slender. "Hey. I have a thought. You know where I could stick this?"

Faith's thighs clench involuntarily. Nope. No idea. She doesn't want him to stick it in anywhere.

Angelus grins. "Naughty thoughts, Faithy? That’s not what I meant at all. Too obvious. And you’re missing the point, which is a little bit annoying. The point is that I can stick it in anywhere."

He demonstrates with Wesley. His finger disappears into Wesley’s stomach with hardly a sound. Wesley only twitches. Faith is very glad that Wesley is so deeply unconscious. Angelus withdraws his finger, glistening with blood and other juices. 

"It's not very scientific, though. I don’t know where I've been, what vital organs I've penetrated.” He licks the finger. "Whew, just blood. Imagine if it had gotten stuck in his gut, I might be tasting poo. And that would be so icky, don’t you agree?"

"And your point is?" Spike says, his voice dripping with boredom and contempt. "’s Far as I’m concerned, this is just you wittering on about nothing. Enjoying the sound of your own voice, are you?"

Angelus straightens up and walks toward Spike. Faith sees Angelus tower over Spike, who isn’t intimidated at all, but lifts his chin a little higher, trying to stare Angelus straight in the eye. Faith tenses, afraid of what might happen, but there’s a disturbance behind the door.

A harried minion in game face tumbles in and prostrates himself before Angelus, or it could be that Dru tripped him.

“Angelus, there’s a delegation from the Queen. She wants to know what you’re doing in her city without her permission.”

“Oh fuck,” Angelus says. “Tell the uppity bitch that I’ll…” He takes a deep breath and smoothes his hair and his expression with one hand, the other one still holding Faith upright with her nose almost in Wesley’s balls. He remembers her with a start and flings her away so that she lands back on her cot, hard.

“Right. On it. Take my arm, Dru.  We’re going to meet her majesty. What’s her name?”  He kicks the minions in the guts to emphasize the question. 

“Va Va Voom, my lord.”

Faith feels a thrill at the name. She remembers the snaky white-skinned queen, the curious feel of the other woman’s palms against hers. It seems so long since she was there, but it was really only 36 hours ago. 

Spike doesn’t join Angelus, and Faith thinks he might well have because he knows Va Va Voom. A tiny patter of hope accelerates her heartbeat, and Spike lifts his head and turns to her.

His finger goes to his lips and Faith nods. Of course she’ll remain silent. He pads over to her, miraculously silent on his great clunky Docs and kneels by her cot.

“Untie me,” Faith says and Spike clamps his hands over her face, frowning down at her in warning.

His face is taut and unreadable and Faith’s heart sinks. He does know how to get them both out of here, doesn’t he? She’s not sure. Spike knows what he’s doing, he always does. Well, he does or he fights and bluffs his way out of it, which works just as well.

She wills her stiff, painful body to relax and butts her head against his chest. 

Spike bends down and brushes his lips briefly against her forehead. Faith turns over on the cot and presses as much of her body as she can against his legs. It’s unsatisfactory contact, layers of denim between them, and she strains to feel skin against skin.

Spike strokes her hair, but she can tell he isn’t really giving himself to the moment. He’s wary and taut, on the alert for Angelus’ return. He puts cool fingers against her broken wrist, which is agony, but Faith forgives him because how can he know? He turns it and she screams briefly. 

“Sorry,” Spike’s mouth shapes. 

He finds an empty wrist and Faith wants to slap him about the head with impatience. When did she ever wear a watch? What’s he waiting for, the cavalry?

Alas, there are no strapping guys in dark blue entering, and no horses whatsoever. Just Angelus and Drusilla again. Angelus looks grim and angry. He pushes Drusilla unceremoniously into Spike’s arms and looms over Faith.

“Too bad we’ve got to cut to the chase, Faith,” he says. “I like to take my time over important things like torture, but politics are forcing me out of town.”

Faith isn’t sure if that is a good or a bad thing. Va Va Voom wants Angelus out, which seems very understandable and sensible, but does it have anything to do with her and Spike? There’s no such thing as coincidence, Spike always says. 

Angelus sighs. “Giving me the silent treatment? Very disappointing. I’m having to take a shortcut here, Faithy, which I regret and I hope you will too. I’ve realized pain is not your thing. Am I right or am I right? The pain just makes you go all stoic, which is so unpleasant in a girl. Must be that Slayer healing. So I’ve decided to go for something a little different, because I have to find out what your thing is. What makes you you? What do you fear? Hm?”

Angelus hoists her up again by her arms and with his other hand peels off her top. Faith is not prepared for that. It’s making her stomach curl and do cartwheels.

Angelus unbuttons his own shirt, which confirms Faith’s fears. Not Angel, please no. She’d prefer to have a go with Drusilla over Angelus abusing Angel’s body like this. It occurs to her that her body will be abused, too, in the process, but that’s something that she’s not really feeling yet. She’s sure that somehow it’s never gonna come to that. Spike will save her.

He’s not doing anything yet, though. Angelus rips off her bra and weighs her breast on his hand, still holding her broken hands in his iron grip. “Gee, those must be a liability in battle. You ever consider surgery?”

The skin over Faith’s whole body constricts so fast that it makes her dizzy. 

Angelus laughs. “And here I’m giving myself new ideas! You think Slayer healing would kick in fast enough if I cut off your breast? Or I could just tear them off.”

The downside of fear is that it makes your nipples perk up tightly as if you’re aroused, although nothing is further from the truth. No way is she interested in Angelus physically. Never ever crossed her mind. Well, maybe a few times, but not since she’s been with Spike. And not like this, of course. Her throat is as tight and crinkled as her skin.

“But, no, that’ll have to wait. I need to be out of here fast, Faith, and you’ve got an important role to play in that. You’re going to tell me where I can find Willow, aren’t you? After I’m done with you, of course.”

He tears her jeans in half, on the seam, and they part as easily as toilet paper. Faith has lost the ability to think ahead. She can only stare in petrified fascination at Angelus’s large hands as they move leisurely to his belt, opening the buckle, unthreading it from the loops, going to the button.

“Here, Angelus, let me have a go at her,” Spike says, suddenly standing next to Angelus. “Soften her up like. Put her in a proper mood.”

Angelus’ eyes narrow. “Now, Spike, what a funny moment to butt in here. And I mean funny peculiar, not funny ha-ha. Your timing makes me real suspicious. Feeling concern for the Slayer after all? Not thinking of double crossing me, are you?”

And like a movie which has skipped a few frames, Angelus has a stake in his hand, poised over Spike’s heart. “Talk quick, boyo, or it’s over.”

“Dunno what you’re so cranky about, Ange,” Spike says, sounding hurt and surprised. “I Can’t express interest in a brilliant piece of fanny without you getting all paranoid?”

Angelus relaxes infinitesimally. “You don’t get to fuck her first, Spike. I drink first, I fuck  first. Whatever got into you to think that could have changed?”

Spike sighs and shrugs. “Who knows? A century of roaming around without my grandsire to keep me in check? Thank God those times are over. You, me and Drusilla, back to being a family.”

“Yeah, well, not sure that’s my priority anymore, Spike. Not without Darla. In fact, you’re a liability.”

Quick as a flash the eerily lit tableau has changed again. Now it’s Drusilla who’s clasped in Angelus’s arms. She looks up to him adoringly, baring her velvet-covered breast with a gleeful smile, a heroine from a Rudolph Valentino movie come to life. 

”You always used to care a little bit too much for her, Spike. If I said Dru had to go, what would you say?”

Dru giggles and strokes Angelus’ arm. “Don’t be silly, Daddy. I’m going to be with you always, because you make me bleed, like daddies do. Want to have at me with the strap? I’d like that most of all. Wicked stake only pinches my skin, doesn’t really hurt me, you know.”

Spike audibly grinds his teeth. “Trust your judgment, of course, Angelus.”

Angelus stares at him, the whites of his eyes awash with the red of the flickering torches. “That is so good to hear, Spike. Whatever I do is right. Fine, then. This is long overdue.”


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and Sylvia Volk

“I’m still not completely convinced of your loyalty, Spike. Souls are pesky things and make you do these really out-of-character things that you later regret. So, who’s it gonna be, Spike me lad, Dru, who you’ve loved for a century even if she’s really daddy’s girl, or the little Slayer with her bouncy assets and her hot little pussy?”

Angelus grinds the stake against Drusilla's bony white chest and Drusilla coos in mindless joy.

Faith can’t breathe. Angelus puts it so clearly. Her or Drusilla? She can’t imagine Spike will choose her. What’s almost a year against a hundred? She’d have staked Drusilla in a heartbeat, what with the whiny high voice and the craziness and the droopy dress sense. But if Spike could take B at her worst, maybe Drusilla’s not that difficult a proposition.

Spike’s standing frozen, his hands stretched to the Drusilla- Angelus tableau.

“Thought you were in a hurry, Ange,” he says, trying for nonchalant, but Faith knows his voice so well. He’s scared, his normal jitters frozen in that absolute stillness he gets when things get rough to the max. "And all of a sudden you’re taking the time to have a bit of play with me? Hey, it’s your choice.”

“Don't bother, Spike,” Angelus says. “I’ve known you for a while now, known you quite well. This is how you used to get when I hadn’t broken you in yet. All a-feared of your little cherry. But when I popped it you screamed like the best of them, so don’t try to fool me.”

He gently frees one of Dru’s little white chicken fillets from her wine-red velvet bodice, and draws blood with the stake’s sharp point. It wells slowly, thicker and darker than human blood, black against Dru’s pale skin.

Angelus‘ voice is still gentle. ”See how pretty she bleeds for me, Spike? And as far as this one goes” - his hand shoots out and the fingers dig brutally deep into Faith’s breast and twist. Faith cries out - “what would she die of, blood loss or shock?”

Spike lists slightly into Faith’s direction. But he doesn’t speak.

“I see it's hard to choose, Will," Angelus says, his voice serene, light, even happy. “That tells me a whole lot.”

He moves himself and Dru closer to Faith. His thick fingers clamp more securely around her boob – his hand is large enough that he can cup the entire swell of creamy flesh - and twists harder. Faith hears herself scream, low and wordlessly like a wounded animal.

Spike charges Angelus and then there’s no more Drusilla where she was just a moment ago. Faith blinks to make sure she saw what she thinks she saw. Maybe Drusilla just wriggled out of Angelus’ grasp and is somewhere else in the dimly lit crypt. She checks out Spike’s face, but it’s frozen in a rictus of hurt and surprise.

Angelus laughs. “No more frills now, back to basics. Spike cares about the Slayer. And I know for pretty damn sure that doesn’t automatically mean that the Slayer cares back, name of Buffy ring a bell, Spike?”

He lets go of Faith and the world goes black for some time. Or maybe it's just a second. It seems that her breast hurts even more now that the damaged tissue gets room to expand.

The scene in front of her eyes has switched. Now Spike is again the one with the stake on this chest.

“Let’s see if it‘s not torturing the Watcher, but torturing the vampire that gets you going, Faithy.  What's it worth to you to keep this vampire dead and kicking? I think his face is a good place to start. What would you miss most? One of these pretty baby blues, or the kissable lips?” 

Angelus pulls them out in a ridiculously emphasized pout. When Angelus lets go, Spike’s lips shape 'no’, but Faith can’t do it anymore. Sure, it’s bad to spill all to Angelus but when push comes to shove she’ll always pick Spike.

“Let him go,” she says. Her voice is mouse-small and squeaky.

Angelus crows out his triumph. “Spikey, Spikey, you bad dog! She luuurves you!”

Spike stumbles to his knees in front of Faith. His face and shirt are gray with Drusilla’s dust, and Faith can’t blame him for the dazed, bewildered look on his face. Drusilla’s gone, just like that. And though she can’t regret it, she feels Spike’s pain like it’s her own. Also, she feels her own big honking pain. Her wrists are almost healed, but her breast throbs and feels like one of those cartoon cannon balls, enormous and about to explode.

“Willow’s in Brazil,” Faith says quickly. “I’ve got her address in my bag somewhere. Sao Paulo.”

“Well done, Faith. Sao Paulo, huh?” Angelus checks his watch. “Louis Armstrong it is, then. Dru, get Faith’s b…” He pauses. “Darn. I’ll just have to do it myself. It’s lonely at the top.”

He repositions his grip on the stake. “Say goodbye, children. One last look into each other’s teary eyes and then it’s farewell for eternity. Faith goes to Hell for being a failure and a murderer, and Spike goes nowhere, for being a vampire. And I’m going to kill me a witch and eat me some bootilicious Brazilian women.”

The door slams open and shows two shining white figures, one of them topped by a flaming crown. The other one has been hit on the head by Jerry and sports a couple of tweeting little birds flying around her head in an excited circle. It dissolves into Morgan, her own Morgan,  standing short and wide and scruffy next to Willow.

“Not just yet,” Willow’s voice says calmly. “Ritornate anima!”

Light bursts out from Angel’s eye sockets and he topples slowly, like a felled forest giant. 

And just like that, it's over? Faith's head is starting to feel like her boob, big and sore and trembly. “Took your sodding time about it, Ms. LeFay,” Spike says grumpily and rubs his chest.

Her wrists are still sore, and she hopes he’s not going to rip her manacles off, as she’s sure he’d prefer to do. She’s numb, she can’t even speak, she can only stare at Morgan chatting to Spike about Angelus and the soul and that she flew straight over with when Spike called.

Great. She’s been the fall guy all along and Spike couldn’t even bother to tell her about it? But then she sees one hand creep to his lapel and bring some Drusilla-dust to his lips, and she forgives him straightaway for all his failings. That’s one outcome he can’t have wanted, even if Drusilla was one evil skanky insane bitch.

She comes back to the world with a start. Willow is giving directions to someone on the other side of her phone call. The echoes of her 911 call return into Faith’s head. Yeah, poor Wesley. She blinks her eyes to clear them of tears and rank, fearful sweat and looks at the bloody slab of muscle hanging down from Wesley's chest. Can he even survive that? Or ever regain the use of that arm?

“Spike, help me get Wesley down,” Willow says.

“Just a mo, Will, let me untie Faith first,” Spike says.

“I think she’s pretty hot too, Spike, but it’s really not healthy to hang upside down for so long.”

Spike looks torn, so Faith tells him to go and help Willow first. Then he just stands there as Willow and Kennedy give Wesley first aid. Ken? She came too? Her guys came when she needed them. Faith has trouble swallowing that huge fact away. Wow. There’s also a whole troupe of young Slayers she doesn’t know swarming into the crypt, tying up Angel, or at least Faith thinks it's Angel again. 

Spike is still staring at Willow, who’s murmuring spell words and passing her hands over Wesley. Poor guy’s gonna need all the help he can get, but at least he’s still alive, a small miracle in itself. Spike doesn’t move.

"Spike," Faith says.

"What?"

"You can untie me now," she says gently.

"Oh. Right. Yeah." He looks around helplessly. "Where are…?" and he's already lost focus again.

Faith takes a deep breath. She would really like to be coddled and cosseted now, but it doesn’t seem to be happening. She guesses that since she’s Slayer, she should just buck up and take it all.

"Ken," she says. "Get me out of these things, will you? Angel's got the keys."

"Sure," Kennedy says and retrieves the keys in two seconds.

When she's freed Faith and she sees the bruises on Faith’s breast and hands, she inhales sharply. "Jesus, Faith, we gotta get you to the hospital too."

"Nah, I'm fine," Faith says, but she changes her mind about putting on a bra.  Her boob hurts when she walks, but the bra would be worse. She very carefully puts on her torn top and goes over to Spike.

"Spike, baby, come on. We're going. Taking you home."

Spike doesn't move. "Ken?" she says. "I need to go home. I need to take Spike home."

"Spike needs to take you home," Kennedy grouses, but after a look from Morgan she subsides. "Sure, girl, you go. We'll clear up here. We got it. You go home and sleep it off. Talk to you later, okay?"

"Spike…" Faith says. She's so exhausted that she can hardly stand.

Spike nods vaguely, but then slips from her hands and starts gathering dust on the crypt floor. "This is Dru," he explains. "I have to take care of her."

"Sure, baby, sure. I’ll help you. Listen, I’m going to ask Morgan to take care of it, okay? Morgan, can you gather up Drusilla's dust and put it in a container or something?"

Morgan gives her a very sharp look. "The vampire dust?" She nods. Two waves of her hand take care of it and Spike cradles the urn like a baby.  Miraculously, the keys to her bike are still in her jeans pocket and now she can take Spike home.

The demonic bar owner wants to give Spike a warm welcome but Faith keeps a tight hold on Spike's arm and pushes him through to the courtyard and into the apartment.

"Let's get you under a warm shower and into bed," she says.

Spike doesn’t answer, still staring with crinkling forehead and slack lips at the dust on his fingertips, and Faith decides to take that as a yes. She places the urn on the big black mantelpiece. The mirror makes it two urns.

She peels off his clothes, but lays them over a chair near the bed instead of in the washer she discovered in the kitchen,  coz Spike gets panicky when she tries to take them away. Her wrists and boob are hurting like crazy after the ride home and lugging the dazed Spike upstairs, but she figures she can hold on long enough to take a shower herself and then glue herself to his back and get unconscious.

The hot water hurts like hell on her boob. Her hands just sort of ache and itch now, which means they’re fine. She drinks a gallon of water from the tap and falls into bed behind Spike, his back cool and safe, like always.


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and sylviavolk

“Nooo!”

Faith shoots upright, straining her throbbing boob to the utmost and falls out of bed. “Fuck. Spike? Are you okay?”

Spike finds the light and sits there staring at her as she gingerly wriggles upright and uses the bed to pull herself up. She can’t use her left arm. The boob is swollen and alarmingly purple.

“Christ, Faith.”

He helps her back into bed. He’s back behind his eyes, which makes her happy, even if he’s looking strained and drawn.

He cradles her very carefully and kisses her hair. “Sweetheart. I’m so glad you’re all right.”

“Are you?”

He must know she’s really asking after the dreadful Drusilla. He shrugs. “No. Yeah. Glad I didn’t have to stake her myself. Dunno if I could have.”

Faith snakes her good arm around Spike’s waist, careful not to squash her breast. He’s trying to downplay what he feels, which is a method of coping she gets, but she’s not sure it’s good for him. She reaches back to her prison days, where group therapy once a week was mandatory for murderers like her. Mostly she remembers the therapist saying nothing or just nodding and going “uh-huh”, so that’s what she does.

It’s not working. Spike remains silent, playing with her hair and straight into space. It’s light enough outside that brightness is spilling in around the curtains. It makes his eyes shine in that distant starry-night blue they get sometimes.

“So how long were you two together?”

Spike sighs and pulls a little too hard at her hair. Faith doesn’t know what Angelus could have done to her to make her hair hurt. It has to have been Drusilla, pulling at unconscious Faith’s hair like an overgrown schoolgirl with an eating disorder.

“Over a century, love. Seems like yesterday that she came up to me in the mews and told me she could see who I really was. I believed her when she talked about vision and glory, stupid sod that I was. And burning baby fishes. Stars in her eyes.”

“I think she was right about you,” Faith says loyally.

“Do you now?”

“Of course. I can see stars when I look at you,” Faith says. "And the burning glory thing? Totally you."

He smiles down at her and his hand cups her cheek. “You have a great heart, Faith. The heart of a poet.”

That is so frosty when he says stuff like that. Sure, an "I love you" would have been even frostier, but Faith's happy with what she gets. She snuggles up closer to him but she moves too quickly and can’t suppress a mewl of pain.

“I’ll leave the bed to you,” Spike says. “Get you some breakfast, eh?”

“No, don’t go away again. I missed you.”

Spike scoots down so their heads are at the same level and gazes into her eyes. “Missed you too.”

“How did Morgan and Ken know to contact Willow to put Angel’s soul back, ya think?”

Spike’s hair is all soft and curly this morning, and she’s not gonna mention it, or the gel will come out to play.

“I called them, of course,” Spike says. “Va Va Voom too, to try and drag things out. Or get him kicked out of town, but Angelus suckered her into allowing him to stay the night. Woman is too damn easy if you ask me.” 

“And they called Willow? Wow. That was clever.”

Spike managed to persuade them and Willow to come, and to bring a whole batch of newly hatched slayers, which is a pretty nifty feat of Watcherly forethought. All without her. “You’re the best boyfriend ever,” she says, but before the sentence is completed the clouds are gathering again. Stupid Faith, to remind him of his dead girlfriend.

Well, she has more than one kind of therapy up her sleeve. She slides her hand down to his belly, deliberately brushing her pinky over the indentation between hipbone and leg, a place she knows is one of his favorites.

Spike draws in a breath and clenches the hand around her arm tighter. “You sure, baby? With your poor tit all black and blue?”

“Dude, I always want you. Especially if I haven’t seen you in days.”

In answer Spike lets his legs fall open so she has better access to his balls, and that’s a pretty clear indication he’s interested, as is his hardening cock. But Faith again utters a tiny groan as she shifts to reach down to him and he pushes her hand off. 

“You lie down, and let me see to you,” he says. 

It doesn’t really matter who’s coddling who, she thinks, as long as the two of them get some distraction from their pains, both their wounds and their heartaches. Spike props pillows behind her back, and one under her sad eggplant boob. When he’s arranged the buffet to his liking he hunkers down and starts eating away. For a second, Faith has a flashback to the ghost episode that made her think Angel was fucking her, and breaking her hands, and she thinks it might have been kind of a Slayer dream, too.  Those things did come true, or almost.

“We’re gonna have to kill the ghost if we wanna live here,” she says.

“Ghost?” Spike lifts a glistening face from her pussy.

“There was a ghost here the other night. Or maybe it’s another kind of creepy demon, but anyway it gives scary dreams.”

“Didn’t dream about anything scary,” he says, shortly. Musta dreamed of Droo then, she guesses. Although she would definitely class the woman in the scary division.

“Maybe because it was almost morning when we got back here.” See how she did not mention the ex?

“Maybe.”

Spike concentrates on his work again and now that Faith has brought him up to date she should let go and enjoy the fruits of a hundred years of practice. For a second the shadow of an old fear rises: did he sleep with Drusilla? But she thinks not, and anyway it would have been for a good cause.

Spike’s tongue licks and curls its way deep into her, but Faith still can’t find the place in her mind to enjoy his TLC to the max. 

“Baby?”  she says. “I want you inside me.”

His cock twitches. “Sure?”

“Sure.”

He lifts himself carefully over her and slides in. She’s glad she’s wet, that’s something, at least. Spike is so careful, sliding in and out just the way he knows she likes it, kissing her good breast, nuzzling her neck, still holding himself away from her wounded side. But it’s not working. Her ribs shudder, and she tries to hide it from him, but there’s something inside her that needs to burst out and give voice.

“Spike,” she forces out, the words thick and gluey in her throat. “I wanna…just hold me, okay?”

He nestles down beside her in the pillows and she hides her aching eyes against his chest. He’s so good to her, he always is. Her fingers flutter over his nipple, but it’s just a cool nub of flesh. She takes a deep breath to say something sweet to him but realizes she shouldn’t have done that. Her lungs expand and the first sob explodes out of her. Shit, and she so wanted not to have to cry anymore. NO has seen nothing but sniffling and blubbering from her and she’s fucking sick of it.

“Shh,” Spike says, “Shh, sweet Faith, just let it out, just let it all out,” and he strokes her hair so gently that he only makes it worse. People shouldn’t be nice to you when you cry, you know? If they ignore it, it’s so much easier to stop, but his loving words just break away the last of her resistance and she bawls.

“Hey, it’s all right, you were scared, and hurt. Bloody Angelus, always losing his bloody soul at the drop of a bloody hat. Who was that bloke with him? Your old watcher?”

“Kind of,” Faith sobs. “And I wasn't scared of Angelus. Been there, done that. I was scared of Drusilla.”

“Creepy bird, our Dru, I kn-“

She stomps his chest, hard. “Not of her. Of you and her.”

“Oh.”

She’s really silenced him now. “But Faith, I love you. You know that, right?”

The words she wanted, but she can’t meet his eyes. “I know it in here,” she says, tapping her head and flinching a little. Angelus must have hit her with a bat to make it hurt for so long. “Not always here.” A fist in her stomach.

“I’m sorry, baby. Don’t I tell you often enough?”

Maybe. Not daily, that’s for sure, but Faith doesn’t want to whine and beg. It’s her own fault. She’s the one who rode off into the daylight. She’s the one went off like a rocket when she thought it was Dawn and not of Drusilla writing the note to Spike in the bar. Spike never talks about either of them, so she should’ve been happy. She’s just scared that he thinks about them all the time. Her fault.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have thought that about you and Dru.”

“Dru’s a soulless vampire. Couldn’t have gotten back together with her, ever, could I?”

“No. But you could be feeling sad about it.”

“Yeah. In a way, maybe. But I said goodbye to her a long time ago, when I chose Buffy’s side.”

Whoa. That’s a first for Spike, mentioning Buffy’s name to her. She sticks a mental tongue out to B in heaven. Even if she dropped down in her wings and whit dress to claim Spike, Faith knows she’d be the one Spike picks. She's sure about it for two whole seconds. She’s no longer Buffy’s second fiddle, but that’s not so much a consolation when there’s two other bitches jostling for the spotlight with their honking big violins. She hastily retreats away from the other, shiny-haired figure behind Buffy. No angel’s wings on that one, that’s for sure.

Spike kisses her forehead. “Do you want to go and visit your Watcher in hospital?”

Poor Wes. Faith doesn’t even know if he’s made it, but she thinks Kennedy would have phoned if he’d died. Fingers crossed. “Yeah. Later. We’re supposed to go and meet the guys and Willow and her Slayerettes to talk about Angel, tonight, so you can come along.”

Spike nods. “Brush your hair?”

His favorite pastime, apart from fucking her, is combing her hair. He's been like a boyfriend and a half since they left Cleveland. It could be perfect if Faith wasn’t half sure it was part guilt. And if he hadn't pulled that let-me-talk-to-the-demons, Faith-trick that pissed her off so badly.

“Sure,” she says, but her heart’s not really in it. The sun is tickling the edges of the faded old curtains and what she’d really like to do, for some reason,  is sit on a sidewalk café in the hot southern sun. She wants to have a dozen cups of coffee, scarf chocolate until she’s sick and not think about vampires for a whole afternoon. That would kind of scratch out the boyfriend time, and maybe that was the point, but here the fantasy starts losing appeal and she tucks it away for later.

She lies face down on his chest while his fingers try and untangle the knots from her hair and heart.

It’s a long day. Spike slumbers. Faith prowls the apartment, and it’s even greater than she'd thought last night. In the afternoon, the sun slants in through the thin white curtains and it’s so fucking fancy she could cry. She wants to live here. There are two huge dark brown wooden clothes chests, with rows and rows of fancy wooden hangers that smell like her Grandma’s closet. She hangs up her two pairs of jeans and her torn skirt, and it looks pathetic. She better get a job if she wants to fill the closets up with Buffy-wear. 

In her roaming around the apartment Faith passes the beat-up brown leather bag several times before she gives in to temptation and up-ends it on the kitchen table. Weapons roll out, little fragrant bags, a smelly old leather-bound book, a tightly bound roll of vinyl, a diary. She puts the diary back first. She doesn't really want to know about the state of Wes' heart. "Dear diary, Angel smiled at me today." Poor sucker.

The weapons are just weapons, although she's a little doubtful of the inscribed dagger. She's heard of spell daggers and she doesn't even want to touch it for fear of getting contaminated. Herbs? She wouldn’t know what to do with him. Magic supplies, she bets. For good measure she sniffs them all, but nothing she'd like to smoke in there. Leather book. Its pages are written in funny letters in funny rusty and greeny black inks, spells she guesses. She had no idea Wesley was such a sorcerer man. She'll give this to Morgan if Wesley doesn’t make it.

Finally she admits to herself what she's really looking for and it's not in Wesley's bag anymore. She finds her slaying satchel and retrieves the vinyl package she's been thinking about all the time. She pries open the tightly bound leather ties and unrolls the vinyl. There they lie, the vials off straw-colored Orpheus and the syringes. Big old-fashioned glass motherfuckers. She feels a bit of past-the-sell-by-date rage that Wesley could have used those things on her. He couldn't have gotten sterile disposable ones? She might have died of some terrible infection here.

She opens one of the tiny bottles and smells the fluid. No scent at all. The thing is that she doesn’t know if she'll be able to get Spike to drink from her again. The one time he did that she almost got drained dry and he fucked her about twenty times until he came down, which was a bit much even for a Slayer. Are these risks worth taking? She needs to know. Where does she stand? There are so many women in Spike's orbit who have a claim on him, and it’s like all these claims are more serious or older than hers, and she just can't take that anymore, it's like he's always just beyond her grasp.

And now he's gone all Mr. Fix-it on her too. Making deals with demons without cluing her in, calling Morgan and Kennedy back in Cleveland. These are good things, she tells herself, but where's she in all this? He's supposed to be her Watcher, but let's face it, he got the Slayer powers too. What is she bringing into their deal?

She holds the syringe up in the muted kitchen sunlight and thinks. She could just use a little bit, much less than before. And without the death wish. Or evil Angelus. She would just walk around in Spike's head and she would know. Really know. The rub being how she would get Spike to drink her blood.

The bell rings. She jumps up guiltily and the syringe clatters from her hands. Jesus. It's not as if they can get in, whoever they are. With pounding heart and shaking hands she tidies the bag away quickly. The vinyl roll-up she stuffs into the freezer, where Spike won't look. Just in time, because he stands outside the kitchen, sleepy-headed, eyes at half mast, unbuttoned jeans and acres of creamy skin, ready to eat. He can't get in with the sunlight blazing in and all. Faith's eyes measure the window for curtains or shades. Can't have him feel excluded in his own apartment.

"You gonna get that door, pet? Little sunny for me."

Faith tears her eyes away from the windows. "Yeah. Sorry. Got distracted."

Spike's eyebrow rises,  and he kisses her neck as she passes. The bell rings again. 

"Faith!" Kennedy squeals and falls around her neck. Good thing her boob is not that sore anymore. "I couldn't wait until tonight! We had to see your apartment. Wow. Just wow. Willya look at those ceilings? Morgan, what do you think?"

Morgan is busy hugging Faith as well. Sometimes Faith really misses Cleveland. And she'll include ghost Tara, wrinkly Clem and slimy Willy in the missage as well. It's a little hard to remember why she needed so urgently to flee away from them all.

"Hey, Spike," Ken says. "You okay?"

"Sure," Spike says.

"I hope you're taking good care of my girl Faith here?" Ken goes on. Ken never knows when to let go of stuff.

"Called you, didn't I? Cavalry," Spike says. "Faith is my lady. I take care of her. Always."

Ken's face shows she's about to take off into best forgotten territory.

"Give it a rest, Ken. Go check out the rest of the apartment. I have rooms, and a prehistoric bathroom, and a balcony. It's awesome," Faith says.

Kennedy toddles off, Morgan in tow, and Faith hears excited littles screams when they hit the bathroom. That just leaves Willow standing in the door opening. Who she hadn't even noticed before now. Her Slayer senses must be taking a retreat in the country. A pang in her belly tells her why. No wonder she's been cranky as hell the last few days. All that traveling has fucked up her sense of time.

"Hey, Willow," Faith says.

"Hey, Faith. Spike."

Spike nods back at Willow and disappears in the direction of the bedroom to get dressed. Willow looks around the high, ornate ceiling, scuffs her sandal over the gleaming hardwood floor. There's an enormous mirror in the hallway, taller than she and Willow combined, faith guesses, and Willow rubs the carved frame with an interested finger. 

"Really cool apartment, Faith. How'd you get it?"

"Made a deal with some demons," Faith says grudgingly. "Also it's haunted."

"Need any help with that? I could probably do you a spell?" Willow offers and sidles closer.

"That would be great, thanks." Faith eyes Willow cautiously. "How's Wesley?"

"Doing as well as can be expected."

Faith waits, but Willow doesn't go on.  “Willow. Tell me what you want, because I know you well enough to see there's something burning on the back of your tongue."

Willow bites her glossy lips. “I’m just concerned about you and Spike.”

“This news to you?”

“No, well, you see, I was just thinking that since Angel lost his, and therefore maybe souls are effectually kind of non-very-tightly attached, that you might want to, you know, keep an eye on Spike?”

“Will, Spike won his soul. It’s not a curse, it’s not gonna come loose the first time he gets a happy.  I know, coz we been there three times a night for over a year, okay?”

“Okay. I didn’t mean to make you doubt Spike, or yourself, or anything, it’s just…”

Faith rakes her hand through her hair. "Will, I don't remember word for word what Wesley said, but somebody or something set Angel up. He drank from a cup, a thing, a fancy word for cup? Something form a Monty Python movie?"

Willow's face is a study in confusion. "The Grail? And hey, I didn't know you were a Monty Python buff."

"That's it. Spike likes them. And here's another thing 'bout Wesley. You remember resouling Angelus last year, don't you?" Faith says.

"Yeah, of course!"

"Wesley doesn't. I think someone, like, say, you or Giles, should look into that. Because there's hinky business going on there."

"Wow. Lost his memory. Did he know you?"

"Yeah, he did, but it's just odd parts he doesn’t remember. He knows somehow he got me out of prison, but now what for and not what we did to get Angel back."

Willow purses her lips, and Faith is glad to have set these mighty thinking wheels in motion away from her and Spike.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and sylviavolk

The formal sitting room in the Council house is pretty crowded with the Slayers leaning against the walls, Willow on the chair, Angel, Spike and Faith. Angel perches stiffly on the edge of the bed. His wrists are handcuffed to it. The flimsy contraption wouldn't stop Angelus for one second, Faith knows, but she guesses it's the psychology of the thing.

"Angel," Spike says. "Ladies."

"Spike, Faith," Angel nods back. 

His eyebrows, his eyes, his mouth, they all have a downward slant. And he should be miserable, serves him right. He should not have lost his soul again.

"How's Wes?" Faith asks Willow.

"Alive," Willow says. "I looked in on him for a minute, but they wouldn't let me near him. Maybe tonight or tomorrow."

"I'd like to visit him," Angel says. "Sit with him. He knows me best."

A wave of astonished and even sneering expressions is visible on the faces of the gathered Slayers, but it's Willow who speaks.

"Angel, you're handcuffed and guarded for a good reason. The same reason you're not going to be visiting Wesley or anyone anytime soon."

"I'm cuffed because I asked you to tie me up," Angel protests, but there's no real force behind it. "I’m not gonna harm Wesley."

"Sure," Willow says, "but this is the third time you lost that soul, Angel. The New Council of Watchers feels that is no longer acceptable."

Angel gives back a stony face.  "I managed to stay on the straight and narrow on my own, so far. I don't need the Council's help."

Spike looms over the sitting Angel, which is a little silly but Faith forgives him for it. They've been at it for an hour now and Angel still hasn't said the magic words. Is it deliberate or doesn't he get what his choices are?

"You never really wanted to choose, mate. Want to gain some kind of reward for your suffering, or what? Am I right or am I right, Angel?"

"I never hoped for the Shanshu," Angel says and looks at the wall. "I can only try and be a good person."

"What's Shanshu? The point is, you never tried to find out.  I wanted to be a better man for Buffy, and I bloody well found out, in mere hours, mind you, where I needed to be to get me a soul. Guess you never loved her enough for that, eh?"

“I won’t lose my soul again,”’ Angel whispers against the wall.

"You can’t even say it and look me in the eye," Faith says. She thought Angel was better than this. 

Spike’s not so merciful. “Right mate, just like you didn’t lose it this time around. You do remember what you did to that poor Watcher bloke, don’t you?”

"Time to listen to advice, Angel. I listened to you when I needed it and you were right. Don't stonewall us." A memory pings Faith. “I think Wesley said Charlie Gunn and Fred were dead too. And Cordy? Did you kill them all?”

“No!” Angel thrusts out the word like he’s bench-pressing three hundred pounds.

“Cordy?” Willow snatches the name out of the air before it evaporates. “You killed Cordelia?”

“God, no. She was in a coma and she died, okay? Charles is in hell and Fred is...something else.”

“So there was no one left to kill,“ Spike says.

Angel flinches.

 “Do you want it, Angel? What about Angelus, deep inside of you? What does he want?”

The cords of Angel’s neck swell up. And he shakes his head with a grinding noise. His teeth? It’s like watching the seven faces of Eve. “I want – I want not to doubt anymore. Second guess myself all the time. I’ve paid and paid and paid and I’m still doing everything wrong.”

“Human condition, mate,” Spike says. “Cheer up, we all feel like that.”

“Not helping, Spike,” Willow says.

Spike ignores her and walks up to Angel. “What do you want, mate? D’you want me to stake you? Finish it?”

Angel shakes his head in mute agony.

Willow flicks her eyes to Faith, asking for permission? Here's her chance. "Let's take this outside, Will," Faith says.

*

Spike and Willow follow her to the main hall, a space where her mother's crappy apartment could have done the conga and not nicked any of the fancy stucco.

“I suddenly thought that I might be really dumb to discuss all this in Angelus’ hearing,“ Faith says. “Angelus is in there somewhere, right?”

“Bollocks. No such thing as Angelus,” Spike says, surprisingly. “Just the poof telling himself stories to keep the guilt away. So yeah, course he’s in there. He is Angelus. ‘S just with the soul, he still knows who he is but he doesn’t want to be him. So if he pretends he’s someone else, he won’t have to take responsibility for all his crimes.”

“I’m glad Buffy never heard this, “Willow says. “She always thought they were two completely different people.”

“Maybe we should ask Wesley?” Willow says. “He was kind of Angel’s Watcher.”

“Don’t,” Faith says, taking charge of the what-ifs before they all lose their focus. “Someone, and I’m thinking Angel because he remembered everything, fucked with Wesley’s memory. He doesn’t remember you and me resouling Angelus that last time.”

Spike lights a cigarette and cedes the conversation to Faith.

“Yeah, you told me yesterday. I wanted to check it out with Wesley, but he’s not gonna be in any condition for stuff like that for a while. I could go into Angel and find out,“ Willow says thoughtfully.

“Go in where?” Faith asks. Her ears burn. Does Willow know about the Orpheus?

“His mind,” Willow says, offhand, as if this is completely normal. “But maybe it would be more merciful not to return those memories to Wesley. He didn’t look like a happy man to me back then.”

“Happy is as happy does,“ Faith's grandmother used to say. Even now Faith is not sure what she meant by that exactly, but the words just roll of out her mouth. “He was stronger then. He’s going to need that strength to get over what Angelus did to him. And they both need to find out what happened to Angel in LA; who set him up.”

“So was I right to not let Angel visit Wesley?”

“Nah,” Faith says. ”Angel’s his friend, isn’t he? He won’t harm Wesley. I mean, if he thinks he’s Angel he won’t.”

"Exactly. As long as he's Angel. We can't allow it to happen again. We're going to have to find a way to attach his soul more permanently. I don't know if that can be done at all, but if we leave it like it is now, Angel's a menace to society," Willow says

Willow doesn't know if it can be done at all? Faith's eyes just about to bug out of their sockets. What about Spike? How can Willow pretend not to know? Her mouth is open to defend Spike, but Spike is faster.

"What the bloody hell are you talking about, Willow? 'Course it can be done. My soul is permanent, innit?"

Willow smiles a little smile. Faith would like to slap it off her face. "So you say, Spike, but in fact I know very little about how you got the soul or how firmly it's attached."

"That's 'cause you never asked, woman!" 

Willow recoils from his vehemence.

"Okay, Spike, calm down, I know I never asked in Sunnydale, but that's because…" Willow falters.

Because what? Faith would like to know too. Why they ignored him in the basement for all that time. Sure, he'd been an evil murderer for a century, but he’d gotten a soul. Didn’t he deserve a chance, just like they gave her?

"Never mind," Spike says. "I'll tell you now, so you can use it to decide what to do with old Peach here. I went to Africa and fought for my soul. There were trials, and in the end I'd earned my soul. And it’s here to stay. Not going to go winging off every time I get a happy."

"I didn’t know that," Willow says. "So there’s already a way to get a permanent soul? How come Angel didn’t know about that?"

"'Cause he doesn’t really _like_ having a soul, Rosenberg. It's his penance, and one day he hopes to get a reward for it."

“Okay, Faith, it’s your call as slayer of New Orleans. I superglue his soul to him or we dust him.”

"Exactly, it's my call," Faith says. "Now if you two can shut up for a minute I can tell you what I asked you outside for. Angel doesn't really want a soul, I guess we agree on that. Will, you were about to say you could design a spell to attach his soul forever?"

"Yeah. Last time I just threw it back in with the old curse coz I could do it quick. But I know I can do a better job of it if I have a few days."

"I'm sure you could," Faith says. "Not my point. I'm saying we shouldn't _give_ the soul to Angel. Let's take him to Africa to fight the trials for it. Only way it's gonna mean something."

Willow gazes at Faith, struck dumb, and Spike beams. 

"That's my girl! But. Dunno if there’s any point in sending him to win his soul,” Spike says slowly, as if he’s still thinking it over. And he should, coz his words could condemn Angel to a dusty ending. “He’s got to want it, or he won’t make it anyway. Or the demon presiding over the trials will hand him something else. We could have Angelus forever, like.”

 “Okay, we present Angel with a choice. If he makes the right one, I’ll call Giles and arrange for travel to Africa for Angel and twenty or so slayers. The LA set-up will have to wait until Wesley is well again and Angel has a permanent soul.” Willow says. She smiles at Faith unexpectedly. “You two feel like shepherding Angel to Africa?”

"No!" Faith says, straight from the heart and hears Spike say the same thing at the same time. Some of the black weight pressing on her heart lifts. Some of it remains. Willow hasn't voiced what needs to happen if Angel can't be persuaded to make the right choice. Someone will have to stake him. Could she do it? Could she ask Spike to?

*

"Angel, we have some options for you. One, actually," Faith says. It's hard to talk to Angel with his brown eyes staring at her, suffering like a dumb animal needing to be put out of its misery. But he's a thinking being, so he's not allowed that option. "There is a way to get a soul that’s permanent. You can travel to Africa and get that soul, like Spike."

 "Like Spike," Angel sneers and turns to face all of them. "You mean, imitate the imitator? I think not."

Spike takes a step forward, but then flaps his hand and sighs. "No use trying to make us dust you, mate. Has to be your own decision. These birds here could stake you just like that, haven’t been mindfucked by you like Buffy, and won’t be. But they're not gonna. I got all the time in the world to wait for you, mate.”

Angel wants to die? To end, anyway? Faith isn't sure what to think anymore. Angel clamps his lips tightly together. 

“Say it, mate, or I’ll stake you right now.”

There's a long silence, and Faith shifts her weight on her other hip, and looks at the girls. Kennedy is staring at Angel as if she's never seen anything this disgusting, but then that's the way she used to look at Spike, before. Willow looks regretful and faintly pleased at the same time. 

“I’ll go to Africa,”  Angel says, but his voice is  thin and powerless.

“Do you believe him?” Willow asks.

Spike shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. The demon will know what he really wants. What I’m worried about is what happens if he wants something else, like world domination or…” Spike visibly shuts himself up and starts again. “Gotta have your Slayer girls standing by. Lots of them, in case he fucks up. Chances are he will, of course.”

“You know him best, I guess,” Willow says.

“Faith?”

“Spike’s my Watcher,” Faith says, just to rub that in to the new Slayers, who might get stake-happy with a good looking vampire around. “He knows what he’s talking about.”

*

They stroll back from the Council Headquarters through the hot night. Evening in the French Quarter is never quiet, but there is quiet between Faith and Spike. She doesn't know what Spike is thinking, but her mind is circling frustratedly around the problem of how to get Spike to drink her blood. Her breast throbs, although it's carefully packed in the sturdiest, widest-strap bra armor she possesses. Not in the mood for a slay, so not.

"Your tampon needs changing, love," Spike says softly in Faith's ear and her stomach lurches in surprise. Sometimes you don't see the easy solution. Blood. It's gonna happen tonight.

"I think _you_ should do it," Faith says, trying for sassy.

Spike squeezes her upper arm softly. Faith notices that there's a lot more give in her fucking arm than there used to be. She should really get back to their Cleveland training program.

"Little stroll first? Buy you a beer and a poor-boy sandwich and show you off to the locals," he says, smiling at her so winningly that she can't refuse. And deep in her heart she knows she can never refuse him anything. Whipped, that's what she is. Rolling over for him and baring her belly every time he crooks a finger. She can't regret it, no matter that he's this totally evil vampire. She’s never felt, like B, that that is reason enough to despise him.

”Stroll where?"

"Dunno, love. Little cafe, bit of music. Nice place, this, don't you think? Old-fashioned, like cities used to be in Europe. Not like those giant concrete monsters where you can't walk anywhere."

He slips his hand through hers and yeah, it's nice. It's hot, of course. There's no cooling off in the dusk like it does in summer nights up north, but it's nice all the same to be out here, leisurely walking along, taking in the sights and sounds of the whole touristy thing going on down here.

Faith is glad she put on her one skirt again. The rip is hardly noticeable, she tells herself, and fuck she'd be hot in her jeans. Willow never even mentioned her new look. She doesn't know how she feels about being back in the Council's arms without so much as a ‘sorry I left Cleveland in such a hurry’ from her side, or a question of whether she even wants to from the Council's side. She’s not sure about that. Slayer, Watcher, those are designations she'd put aside during her trip down south, when she could pretend that they were just a girl and her guy, taking a trip and enjoying themselves. 

The whole thing with Angel touches the same nerve as the Slaying. People get hurt in that business. She's gotten hurt. She's walking slowly, doing everything she can to protect her wounded left side from bumping into anyone, and it’s killing the suddenly-it's-a-date part of the evening for her.

Spike notices, like he does these days, and steers her to another one of those little hole-in-the wall places NO has. She's not sure she likes the music, but Spike seems to enjoy it. He seats her, very gentlemanly, pulling out her chair and shit. He’s never done that before, not once. Maybe all the Dennys and McBurgers down Kentucky and Alabama way weren't the right surroundings for that.

He orders beer for her, and then holds her hands again. Faith is still feeling weird. She ought to be over the moon, she guesses, having a romantic date in this special old city and everything, but she's not feeling it. She's experiencing her feelings through a thick, suffocating blanket and she gets panicky, deep inside under the blanket, that Spike's going to give up on the lovey-dovey stuff if she doesn’t respond quick enough. If she likes it so much, why isn’t she feeling it?

Spike's hands slide around her shoulders, easing on her jeans jacket against the chill of the AC. He takes extra special care not to jostle her boob. Tears prick in her eyes. She's so dumb to be grateful for a little thing like that. Would any boyfriend do that? For normal girls? She doesn’t know stuff like this. She just got fucked and dumped. But tonight she's gonna find out what it all means. She'll know.

He lifts her chin with his big thumb and looks into her eyes. "What is it, sweetheart?"

His eyes are so blue, but not a chilly blue like lots of people have. It’s this hot, almost turquoisey blue, like a summer sky over Boston, a little hazy with humidity on a day when you know there's gonna be a thunderstorm later in the afternoon.

"What did you think of what Willow said?" Spike asks abruptly, before she can answer to his earlier question. "Going back to slaying for the Council?"

A good question, which is why Faith doesn’t understand at all what's bursting out of her unchecked. "Why didn't you call me? Why did you set me up? Didn’t you trust that I wouldn’t betray you?"

And like that, the blankets around her feelings are gone. She almost wishes them back, because she’s hurting. She's mad at Spike for letting her drive off from Va Va Voom's, for leaving with Dru, for taking on Angelus on his own. Calling Ken and Morgan while she knew nothing.

"Don’t you know that if a girl rides off on her bike she just wants to be hauled off and kissed and…"

Spike's hands around her forearms are anchoring her; keeping her in the present.

"Faith, I would never do anything you didn’t want. I thought you…"

"Don’t think, act! If I didn’t want it I would have slugged you, okay? You should have at least tried."

His face is close, his eyes dark and concerned. "Christ, Faith. A bloke’s damned when he doesn’t, doomed when he does. I do try, you know."

Her fingertips are crackling with new fire. It slowly burns its way up the fuse to her heart, her lips, making her heart pound with something almost like fear, and maybe it is akin to it. Fight, flight or fuck, isn’t that how it goes?  But tonight it's going to be a fourth option. Find out. She'll know.

She's gonna kiss him, to hell with all the other people looking in on their lovers' tiff. She grabs his neck and hauls him close. "C'mere."

She feels him smile against her lips.  "Let's forget about the beer, eh, love? Let's go home."

There’s a little thrill in Faith's belly when she thinks of the apartment. Home, yeah. "We'll get some beer and stuff for me to eat in bed, okay? And you can eat me.  Let's go now."

She didn't mean to do this, get all whiny and get him to apologize, but it fits in fine with her plan. She pictures where she left the Orpheus, in the leather fold-up bag in the toilet, a place Spike never comes. She'll do it in the back of her upper arm. He won't notice.


	11. Chapter 11

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and sylviavolk

Faith climbs on a stool and gently turns the bathroom lightbulb out of its socket. It smashes against the tiled floor and she swears softly. She steps off the stool carefully, trying not to get glass in her foot, because she'd forgotten that it would be dark with the bulb out of action. She feels around on the floor until she finds a biggish piece and cuts three of her left-hand fingers on it. The blood flows freely, black against her fingers in the semi-darkness.

"Ouch!" she says loudly. 

Spike has opened the balcony doors and stands silhouetted against the purple night sky, balanced on one hip like that picture of a statue she once saw, and nearly as white. His clothes make a pool of darkness on the wooden floor. And she's always dreamed of having French doors with white curtains waving gently in the breeze, like seaweed in a current.

"Baby," she whispers and lifts her bleeding fingers to his mouth Spike sucks reflexively,  turns and smiles at her. His thick cock, darker than his pale flesh, points straight at her and sparks a spasm of answering lust in Faith's belly. Or somewhere near there. It could the Orpheus, of course, racing through her veins like a mugger on PCP.

He's so hard for her. He must have smelled her all the way from the bathroom. Faith goes to him, so wet and slick her cunt makes small squishy sounds as she walks, breasts swaying, one pale, one dark with bruises, but she doesn't feel the pain anymore.

She walks into his arms and traps his cock between their bodies. She croons a wordless song into his mouth and rolls him between their bellies, hard, so that he moans and she can feel his thighs tremble. It doesn’t satisfy Faith. This is the kind of power she's always had over men, and it's empty. She wants the power of love, but does she have it? She's going to find out.

"Eat me, baby," she sighs in his ear. "Make me come."

His cock twitches against her belly and he scoops her up and throws her on the bed. It must be more than twelve feet, because the room's so big, and Faith flies ahead of her body onto the soft white bed. Her body lands later, and her mind slots back into place inside it with an audible plop. Or no, that was just Spike taking out her tampon. He hoists her ass up on his hands and gazes down at her wide-open pussy like a hungry man at a burger. Maybe he is hungry. She hasn’t seen him drink since she took him home last night. A little guilt forms, from not noticing that earlier, but she balls it up in lobs it into a corner. Let it skulk there. She's not doing guilt right now.

Spike's tongue laps at her like a lick of cold fire, and her whole body amps up and starts to jitter and glow. 

"Spike," someone moans. 

"Let it come, baby, let it come. Scream for Spike."

She screams, and her body pulses out more of that dark trickle, straight into his mouth. She doesn't know if this sluggish blood will do the trick, or the fresh red blood from her fingers. Better to have done both. She feels the bumps and ridges of his other face rub against her thighs, sandpaper making her supersensitive skin hornier and hungrier.

Faith can't move. Spike keeps her balancing on a high wire of orgasms, stringing her out from top to top and her stomach muscles start to hurt from all the clenching. Finally he sets her ass back down on the bed. He pushes her knees to her shoulders and plunges inside her in one deep stroke. She has a lot of feeling there too, but it's a deep dark red, not like the electric blue screaming of a clit orgasm.

With another of those little pops, she's out of her body. She floats above it, and it's kinda gross to look at yourself grunting and sweating and being fucked by a monster. She floats away. Will it hurt if she bumps against the ceiling? But no, she floats straight through it, into an alien landscape of pale colors and blindingly bright light. She's not disembodied here, and she falls down  onto the ground. The surface is rough, cool, pitted with potholes and sparsely covered by rough brown grass. The ground is uneven, and in the distance she can see it falling away sharply into a canyon, and behind her it grows up into an irregularly shaped hill. Spike isn't there.

And then he is. He's naked, reclining casually against one of the ridges. 

"Hey, Faith," he says calmly.

"Spike!"

He just lays there, a vague smile on his face, completely unsurprised at being there. At seeing her there. It's nothing like it was in Angelus' head. He knew right away she was an intruder and they were shuttled to and fro in Angel's memory like _It's a Wonderful Life_ , only with Barry Manilow and bad hair. In Spike's head it's kinda dull, nothing but pale buff earth and dull brown vegetation, the greenish sky blindingly hot from the sun. Hey, that's odd. In Spike's mind the sun is shining. That would probably be something really deep and significant, if she was the kind of person who knew about stuff like that.

"Do you miss the sun?" she asks and sits down next to him. 

Spike considers it slowly. "Never thought about it," he says and falls silent again.

Faith is already bored and antsy. Spike is relaxed to the point of non-existence. He's not even hard, which is close to an insult with her hot naked bod just beside him. She scoots closer, deliberately jiggling her breasts to get him to notice.

He reaches out with  unhurried movements and pats her hip. The touch of his hand is faintly insubstantial, as if he's not really there. Faith pinches the flesh of her belly. She's solid. What's up with him? Directness is usually her strategy, hell, it's her only strategy, so she grabs his cock and pumps it. Spike shifts a little, making himself comfortable, and that's it. He just lays there, his face upturned to the sun, vague smile still in place, and she's working it and no reaction at all. Shit. She'd fucking prefer Angelus trying to kill her. This passivity is freaking her out. 

Faith pulls at Spike's soft cock a little too hard and again he pats her hip. She's not the fricking dog, for crying out loud.

Faith gets up. She does anger better when she's standing. "Hey!" she shouts.

Spike shows no more reaction than before. "Look at me, Spike!' she shouts again and stamps her feet. The ground gives a little, which is so unexpected she almost loses her balance. This ain't sand. And isn't it creepy the way it's exactly the color of Spike's body? What is this place? While she stands there and tries to find a clue to where she is and what it means, Spike starts fading gently. She falls on her knees and tries to hold him, call him back to her, but he slides through her fingers like smoke and is gone. Only his smell lingers, like that cartoon cat's smile.

She thinks of lying down. Would that be giving up? She doesn’t understand this. In Angelus' mind, there was nothing but confrontation all the time. She didn't have to go look for the essence of Angel’s psyche, it was smack in her face. Why is Spike eluding her? Shouldn't he be present in his own mind?

Faith lies down. The Spike smell is stronger, so close to the ground, and she rubs her hand over the earth and inhales deeply. Vintage Spike, old leather and booze, hot copper and tobacco. Best smell ever.

She's startled out of her dreamy enjoyment of the Spikey comfort smell when the whole ground shivers and makes a growling sound, like a hundred thousand sacks of pebbles being dumped in a garden. Thunder, vast, but too far to be seriously threatening, rolls in from a great distance. When she looks in the direction of the storm, she sees nothing, just pale mountains, green sky and the sun moving along in it at a fast clip. Faith shivers in spite of the heat. These are not like scenes from Spike's past being replayed, with rules a lot like the normal world. For one thing, there is no real Spike. She's starting to regret her decision to take the Orpheus.

Then she changes her mind and gives herself a stern talking-to. You wanted this, now go and get what you came for. This is Spike's mind, he's gotta be somewhere. So it's not where you fell in, boo hoo. Go and find him! It helps. Sometimes she just needs a good kick in the ass.

Faith starts walking south, or what she thinks of as south; the place where the sun is hanging motionlessly in the sky now, just above another, higher mountain range. The ground she walks on trembles and heaves, but no fissures appear, and there are no buildings to fall on top of her, so she goes on. The pale brown grass grows darker and more plentiful, until she is in a forest of thin brown spiraling trees. When she looks up, she can see the twin peaks of the mountains filling up the sky, with some odd rock shapes at their juncture. High above sways the sun.

Faith sits down against a thin crinkly stalk of tree to rest for a bit. She's not precisely weary or hungry, but it feels like she's been here a long time. She closes her eyes,  just for a moment. When she opens them a second later, she falls over. The tree she's been leaning against has shrunk into a kinked stalk of grass no higher than her hips. Huh. She looks around. The whole forest has shrunk, and so have the hills. And the sun is closer. Things are different. She tests the solidity of the pale ground, and it sort of bounces back at her, like a waterbed. A shiver runs through the former woods turned grassland. 

The faintest warning of a notion shivers through her mind. Something…if she grew ten times her former size, she could grow again? And then what would she see? She tries to minimize everything she sees and it's suddenly clear she's sitting in somebody's crotch hair. Which would be kind of ew, but she's pretty sure it's Spike's, and she's done more to that crotch hair than just sit in it.  And now she also knows why the color of the ground is as pale as Spike's skin. 

Okay, she’ll just have to grow some more to fit in with Spike's size. The rocking of his hips throws her down on her face, and what the hell is he doing? She looks up into the sky, sees the sun coming closer, and she's in Spike's mind, so it’s not the real sun, she knows that, but still it’s frightening to see an enormous fireball come zooming down to you and…

The sun has a face. Spike's mind is Teletubbie land. The face comes closer, the corona of the sun dissolves into whipping golden hair, and Faith's heart changes into a clump of lead the size of a basketball before her brain can form the words. Buffy. Buffy's face. Of course it's Buffy's face. And attached to Buffy's face is Buffy's body, and she's about to lower that body onto Spike's mountain pinnacle, where she will casually squash miniature Faith without intending to. The more important part of this realization is that inside the privacy of his own head Spike is boinking Buffy, while in the real world he's making a pretty convincing show of boinking Faith. She is so fucking dumb.

She will also be fucking dead if she doesn't move. She closes her eyes, wills herself to grow bigger and starts running while her eyes are still opening. She runs as fast as she can while she sees Buffy's enormous gross shiny tunnel of love come barreling down on her. The triple-x rated version of the attack of the 50 foot woman. 

Faith has gotten a little bigger herself, but not a hell of a lot. Size inside someone's brain points to psychological issues. But whose? Is she so small because she feels herself to be small, or is she so small because she doesn’t matter a whole lot to Spike? This is not what she came here to find out. That question she knew already; she wanted fricking answers. She throws herself off the white cliff of Spike's flesh just in time before the juggernaut lands. The air displaced by the meeting of the two giants gives her a push in the back so that she lands hard – but not as hard as she expected. The surface is creamy gold, cunningly twisted ropes dicing under and over each other in a regular pattern. A sheet. She's on a sheet. Far in the distance, she can now see another source of light, and slowly she makes sense of the enormous distances she sees. She's on a bed, and so are the thrashing giants above her, in a dark space, with a small table lamp beside the bed. The bed heaves and shakes, and she holds on with both hands to the thick cotton rope to keep from being tossed down into the abyss beside the bed. There is roaring, and the waving of giant boobs and hands above her. The light of the Buffy sun is obscured by a limb so vast Africa could feed on it for years, and then there is more rumbling and tossing of huge objects. Faith waits it out. It's hard to see things at this scale, but she thinks Buffy is about to leave. Why would Spike's mind-Buffy ever leave? Faith would never let Spike leave if he was fucking her inside his head. But then she starts to think her first idea of what happens inside people's heads might be right. Maybe this is a scenario that was once real and is now playing again in Spike's mind. 

She needs to get bigger so she'll be on Spike's radar. So he’ll see her, not just shiver a little like a horse shucking off flies when she stamps her foot. She gets it now, everything here is a story that representing her fucking feelings.  Or Spike's. Whose head are they in anyway? 

And she wants to know what is really going on. She closes her eyes and grows. She keeps them closed for what seems a long time and when she opens them again, she is about frog sized. They don’t see her.

"Buffy. Stay," Spike says in a pathetic tone she's never heard from him before. Like he's inviting Buffy to trample all over his feelings, and right on cue, Buffy does.

"I'm going, Spike. Dawn needs me."

"Nibblet's asleep, Buffy. Stay a bit. Let me make you happy again."

"You give me a happy, Spike, you don’t make me happy. And you never will, because you are nothing."

Spike looks miserable and so does Buffy. Buffy dresses with jerky, angular movements, hating her clothes and her body and her presence with Spike with equal ferocity. Faith feels so sorry for her. Spike would have made her happy if only she would have let him. Well, and if the world hadn't almost ended because one of them had to die to save it, that's for sure. Or maybe Faith could have volunteered. It's a good thing it never entered her mind, and Buffy wouldn't have trusted her to. Poor Buffy and poor Spike.

Buffy leaves with a last furious look at Spike and slams the door hard. Spike lets his head sink onto his knees. Jesus. Get a grip, Faith thinks. She's never gonna love you if you're sticking to the doormat impression.

Oh, wait; maybe she should give Spike the benefit of this wisdom.

“Hey, Spike,” she says. “Lighten up, man. This is not gonna work. You gotta show some more…I don't know, spunk. Attitude. Where’s the attitude?”

Spike doesn’t answer, just looks up vaguely, and then down again. After a long while, he gets up, and slouches over to his clothes. After a long and listless search he finds his cigarettes and lights up. Every line in his body says defeated, beaten, loser. She’d’a never fallen in love with him if she’d known him like that. She’d doesn't blame B as much as she did for not loving him.

Faith tries yelling at him a few more times, but she must be completely invisible and inaudible. This is boring. This is pretty frustrating. She tries to remember how it went with Angel. Did he influence the sequences? She can’t remember. Mostly she recalls fighting with Angelus. She sits down against the bed and looks around into the crypt. It’s kinda cool, what he’s done with it. Classy, the carpets and the cream bedclothes. Spike’s got taste. He should do up their new place just like this. Hang the carpets for the windows in the bedroom, so he won‘t get burnt in the night. This is a great idea; she wishes they could get started right away. Yeah, only she’s stuck in the boring version of the Orpheus. Maybe it’s like this because he didn’t bite her. Maybe she didn’t take enough. 

It occurs to Faith that she’s very lucid and all, but still under. If it’s going to be this boring, she might as well be awake. Talking to Willow and Kennedy about Angel is more fun than this. 

“Spike!” she yells, sick of waiting around while he shuffles through the crypt like an old man who’s lost his balls. “Get out of your funk and talk to me. Hey!”

Spike looks up vaguely. Now Faith is getting really pissed. “I’m talking to you!”

Spike narrows his eyes and shakes his head. She’s had it. She slaps him, hard. “Buffy?” he says in this soft, confuzzled voice that makes her madder than before. “No, it’s not Buffy, it's me. Wake up. It’s me, Faith, the woman you said you loved. Wake up. See me.”

Without any transition, she’s somewhere else. It's dark, a stuffy, rustly kind of dark, smells of old paper and mice. Reminds her of her high school for some reason, although she certainly never hung around in the basement back then. Anyway, Boston basements have rats and stuff. There's a rhythmic knocking somewhere. Okay. She takes a deep breath. This is going to be another place in Spike's brain. Buffy and Spike in the first vision weren't real, it was just Spike reliving something. She's gotta remember that.

"Hello!" Faith calls out. The knocking stops, which makes her think someone is there after all, but there is no answer. At least she knows the someone heard her.

Faith stands mute and motionless, trying not to make any sound. She hears the faintest scratching to her left, and crawls underneath the stacks of old desks and chests of drawers.

"No no," a voice whispers pathetically. "No no no no. I've been good. It wasn't me, it really wasn't."

It's a British voice, faintly familiar in its inflections, but she knows for sure this isn't Wesley, or even Giles, but it does sound a bit like them. High and prissy. 

She rounds a corner of a big desk standing on its side and then she sees the owner of the voice. His two-tone, curly head is bent forward almost to his chest, and still he's bonking the back of his head against the wall. Thud thud. 

She waits. She's a hunter, she knows how to let something small and afraid come out on its own before she pounces.

Slowly the curly head lifts and Faith's heart starts thudding dully in a beat similar to the head banging that was going on a moment ago. Spike? She almost scrambles forward to take him in her arms, but she reminds herself that this is like a dream. This is the Orpheus showing her things inside Spike's head, not reality. She knows this. It's still hard not to try and help him.

"Spike?" she says softly, not moving, like trying to lure a wary cat or dog,

"No no," the pedantic voice says. "Most certainly not. No one here of that name, no no. And you, my good woman, you are here without permission. Now run off like a good girl before I tell your master on you."

Huh. He's crazy and he thinks she's a servant. That's very flattering. But hey, it's an improvement over being invisible.   

"It's Faith, Spike. And you're reliving like, ancient, memories. So why don’t you snap out of it and we can have a little grown-up talk?"

"Don't recall killing you. I think it's not fair to torture me with other people's ghosts, what do you say?"

"I'm not a ghost, Spike. And you do know me. I'm your girlfriend."

"I say! I haven't sunk to consorting with persons of your quality, young woman. How dare you suggest something like that!"

He's staring angrily at her, pointing a quivering, indignant finger to what Faith guesses is the exit. What does he mean? Is he saying she's not good enough for him? She's getting kinda pissed here.

"And you thought Buffy was good enough? Why? We're both slayers. You like her better because her mom went to college? You've got to be joking."

"Breeding always tells," Spike says darkly and turns away his head. "Do not speak to me again, you trollop. Off with you now, or I shall alert the constable."

"Spike, please?" Faith hardly recognizes her voice, raw and childishly naked in its need.

Spike sits up straighter and holds out a hand. "Dawn?"

Oh, this is rich. She decides she doesn’t want to talk to this reincarnation of Spike. If this, this uber-watcher snot, is the kind of person he was before he was vampirized, she's almost grateful to Drusilla. 

She stomps off in the direction he pointed, although she can't see a thing here and her thighs meet more chairs and chests of drawers than they'd like to.

"I'm sorry, Faith," Spike's quiet, sane voice says behind her. It's a little ragged with too much booze and cigarettes but she's always kind of dug that.

She turns around to welcome his return to the state of normal but when she does, she's somewhere else. Oh. It's their old home in Cleveland. Looking worse than she's seen it in a long time. Still traveling through denial land with Spike. 

"Hey, Spike,” she says, resigned to reliving through another boring, since bygone, moment.

The living room is thick with dust, smoke, pizza boxes and smelly clothes. Faith, or the Faith that was, is wearing a boob tube and a very short skirt. Kinda trashy, if truth be told. She hadn't realized she'd moved away from fashion choices like that. But what it really means is that this is the end of summer in Cleveland, when they first got here. When things between Spike and her weren't so peachy. She realizes with a bitter swallow that there have actually been more of the bad times than the peachy ones. Trust her not to have smooth sailing in the boyfriend boat race.

"I'm sorry, Faith," Spike says in that ragged, frayed voice. "Didn’t mean to bail on you like that." He's not looking at her while he speaks, his eyes are far away, staring into the black hole of the night-time window.

Faith has no idea which time he means. There were so many bad moments then. "It's alright, Spike," she says. "We'll get through this together, okay? I love you."

Spike waits too long before smiling at that, painfully grimacing more like it. He didn’t feel he deserved her love then, she remembers. Is that still it? Is that at the heart of their troubles or is it just that he's eternally seeing Buffy the Sun shining in his brain? No, she's not worthy of his love. It's like a low-selfesteemathon in here. Who likes him or herself the least?

Faith wants to get out of this thought-rut. She wants to talk to with the active, interactive part of Spike's brain, like Angelus, if it has to be the unsouled part. This is going nowhere.  It's making her feel like shit, realizing the very small role she plays in Spike's memories. At least Angelus was paying attention when he was trying to kill her.

She's lying on the edge of a bed, feet on the floor, and someone is fucking her. It's pretty fucking good, she's hovering on the edge of coming, and she would if only her chest wasn't so tightly bound by…a corset? She looks up into Angelus' grinning brown eyes. This never happened, except in really sick fantasies. Okay, so it happened quite a lot. But she's in Spike's head now. No need to bother him with the scenarios she needed to get through the lonely times in prison, right? Her hands look pale and bony, and she approves of the dark nail polish she's wearing while she clenches her fingers around Angelus' thick cold arms in the billowy white shirt. Angelus looks up and aside, a gut-churning grin on his face. Faith sees Spike, also with the Ren Faire clothing and bad hair, standing in the doorway with the kind of hurt look on his face she associates with Buffy. Oops. So it is Spike's fantasy? And he caught Angel with Buffy or what? She looks at her own body again. Right. This isn’t her, of course, no, because Faith hardly plays any kind of role in Spike's thoughts, no need to rub her face in it again. Being inside Drusilla is just an excuse this time. She's had enough. She wants out of his head, it’s only telling her things she doesn't want to know. Stupid Faith, as usual.

Angelus goes on thrusting with that shit-eating grin on his face and she wishes her body wouldn’t ignore her feelings of embarrassment and shame, but it just goes on slipping down slowly into a mindblowing orgasm. 

"This was a bad idea, Faith," Angel says.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta-ed by: mommanerd and sylviavolk

What the huh? No, it's true. Angelus is still fucking her, but there's another one of his kind, the souled and modern-day dressed version, standing there looking down on Faith and Angelus with a disapproving frown. Angel looks strained and sad, just like she saw him last, as if her behavior hurts him. "You'd better wake up now, Faith. Your body can't keep this up much longer."

"He's right, you know," another voice chimes in. It's Buffy, wearing a beautiful suede fringed jacket and her most harrowed and pinched look. The General look. "It's one thing you stole my boyfriend, but you shouldn’t have given him Orpheus, Faith. Bad call."

Buffy and Angel look at each other and nod. They're totally agreeing with each other. But Angelus doesn’t seem to hear them, and Spike is still ranting and working himself up in the doorway. Yeah, she kind of agrees with them too, much as she hates to. This is one situation that needs to be left behind ASAP. 

"Do get on with it, Faith," two of them are saying simultaneously. What are these Watchers doing in Spike's head? It’s just wrong. They are standing next to Buffy and Angel, ; Wesley pale and with a fetching white bandage around his head, which is so not right because there was more like disembowelment and wouldn't her teachers be proud of her for knowing that word? 

Giles shakes his head at Miss Post. "Faith has a hard time accepting advice from her superiors. She needs to work on that."

Miss Post nods. "Obedience is a virtue, Faith. When one is a soldier, the foremost virtue."

Can't these people please leave her alone? They're not helping, she can't leave. She can't even move Drusilla's body. It just does what it pleases without any direction from her. She comes, and why the fuck does Drusilla need to keep her eyes open and lick her lips triumphantly at Spike? So fricking embarrassing when there are other people in the room.

Wesley starts bleeding, from his belly this time, and Angel kneels down like he's gonna pray, opens up Wes' shirt and starts licking the wound. That never happened, Faith hopes. This is not Queer as Vampires, it's This is Your Life. 

Willow comes in with a big bag full of magical tools and starts laying them out on green cloth. "Wand," she says crisply to Giles, and he hands her a stick without missing a beat. 

Faith decides this is the real Willow, come to help her out of her Orpheus coma. It's a good idea, because it's going nowhere. She didn't get the answer she wanted, and all these people looking down on her with frowny faces and tightly crossed arms aren't helping. Their ranks keep on swelling, she sees her Gran, who doesn’t react to her happy wave, grade school teachers, social workers, prison shrinks, trustees, more Wesleys and Gileses, crowding the room, and they are freaking watching Angelus fuck Faith in Drusilla's body. This is worse than being naked during your SATs, which anyway never happened to her because she didn’t take them.

She forces herself to look into Angelus eyes. They're blue. Oh, hey, they're Spike's eyes. Okay, a little bit better. Sadly, the crowd of people making notes on yellow paper hasn't thinned out, and they're all in her own bedroom. It's even more embarrassing now that it might be reality instead of dream. Is she awake? Faith thinks not. Nobody is talking to her, they're all talking to each other, and strain as she may to understand, the words throb and hiss in the room like an evil seashore, or the communication attempts of a weird alien race.

Wake up, Faith, she tells herself. 

Nothing changes. She decides to leave. If she can leave, it must mean she's awake. She shoves Spike away and climbs out of the bed. The first thing she does is take a step and to stick her head out of the window.  It’s such a relief to uncramp her limbs and breathe in fresh air. She turns back to the room and sees herself lying still beneath Spike, her face the palest shade of olive she's ever seen, contorted in this weird orgasmic grimace. She's not as pretty as she thought she was. Her skin looks greasy and her lips are dry. One flabby tit is squeezed is squeezed into a donut-shape between Spike and herself.

Faith looks down at herself. She's dressed, which should have given her a clue right away. Jeans, boots, tight shiny top. Not New Orleans gear, but she's not hot. She tries to touch herself, but her fingers go right through her leg, and it feels like nothing. She's nothing, just air. Great.

She walks over to Willow. "Hey, Will. I gotta say, I do hope you didn’t bring your digital camera."

Willow turns around and a strand of her hair whips straight through Faith. It doesn't actually hurt, but she feels even less solid then before. It seems like a definite 'no' on the question whether people can hear her, but for good measure, she tries with Ken and Angel. She sees now that Miss Post and Giles aren't really here, and neither is her Gran. Such a relief. The real people who are present have seen some strange things in their lives and won't be fazed by a little Orpheus overdose. Wesley, the only person who does know about Orpheus, is sitting pale and wan in his chair. It's a miracle he's here, really. Which brings up the question, how long have she and Spike been lying there like this? 

Christ. Even a Slayer needs to eat and drink. While she has worried thoughts about dying of thirst zooming around her head like angry bees, Kennedy walks up to the bed and trickles a few drops from a moist sponge into bed-Faith's mouth. Good. The bees aren't letting up, though, and annoyingly they can touch her. Sting, too, maybe, so she guesses they're not real bees. They should just fuck off, but they don’t. Faith weaves through the throng of people, although she might not even need to, being a ghost or whatever, but the bees find her without fail. At last, in desperation, she jumps off the balcony into the overgrown courtyard.

Outside the sky is lighting up into grey and pale lilac, and she looks back worriedly to the brightly window, where unidentifiable shadows move to and fro. She’ll just have to trust that somebody is going to remember to draw the blinds. She's fairly sure Angel will, at least.

Now what? Not much to do in NO when you're dead. Or maybe there is. No reason she can't go and find out, is there? She turns away from the window and points herself to where she thinks the French Quarter is. Her foot finds nothing but thin air and she tumbles headfirst into a deep dark hole.

This is no time to remember reading Alice in Wonderland, she tells herself, and with a squishy thud, she drops down onto the bottom of the hole. For a second she stares up at the brightening sky, but it starts raining. Thick gobs of something dark and sticky shower down on her and she can't move anymore. The chunks fall on her with a repulsive softness. They're not cold, as she vaguely thinks they should be. What are they made of? But she can’t move, and why the hell is the earth pressing her down so hard? There's only darkness above her, and wasn't she a ghost? 

Time passes. Darkness surrounds her on all sides, a close, overly familiar darkness that presses down on her in places no darkness should come, nosing between her legs, extending tendrils into her ears and nose. Her tongue lies like a dead slug in her mouth. Is this death? Did she die up there in the apartment and this is hell? The weight of that thought is heavier than the weight of the earth on her chest, and she panics. She can't breathe. She isn’t breathing. She tries to move her arms, hits something soft and smooth covering a harder substance, and she knows this. This is like the dreams she had in prison, of waking up in a coffin and not being dead and clawing out of her grave. They lasted for months and they were the most terrible dreams she's ever had. Sometimes she succeeded, and sometimes she didn't, and died alone, screaming her throat to bloody ribbons and clawing her fingers to the bone.

Faith shakes off the terror of those long-ago dreams and starts seriously working at the satin coffin lining. Her belt has a buckle and a pin. The pin rips the satin, her knees shatter the wood, and then there is just earth on top of her;, moist, stifling, smelly. It's just six feet, she tells herself, just six feet. Sod. Sodding, Spike might say. The English are weird. 

Six feet is kinda long, Faith discovers. When you just have your hands, and your fingernails break and you can't breathe and re panicking and are red spots in front of your eyes and it never ends and you're gonna die. 

Her right hand breaks through into nothingness and her lungs find a bit of air. She wiggles the arm and she inhales some dirt. She doesn’t care. She's almost there. She wriggles out of the earth like a worm. The dirt clings to her, pulling at her clothes like a vacuum cleaner turned bloodsucker, reluctant to let go. She kicks and claws herself out of the cold and clammy womb into more darkness, filled with roaring and fire and screams.

She stands, waving in the darkness, unsure of up and down, turning in a circle to discover where the danger is. Not far away, she discovers. All around her, in fact. Demon thugs on motorcycles circle her, brandishing torches and swords dripping with gore. She should take a stand, be a Slayer, but something in her is crumpled like a used tissue and she can't do it. She breaks through a gap in their line and runs for it.

Faith stumbles on her stiff, slightly too large heels. Her dress is hampering her stride, and that's why she never wears dresses, and she can't see very well in the hot smoky darkness, and it's impossible to distinguish between screams and engines revving and tires screeching where she is and where she should go. This is hell. Hell is tarmac and fires and drunken roars coming at you from all sides. There's a door. She stumbles inside, and then it's cool and there’s is music. Still smoky, but the kind of smoky that makes her itch for a cigarette, only now she isn't. She tosses her hair back and its weight is different and when she catches a strand it's blond and crinkly. For a moment, she had forgotten she was dreaming or whatevering, and this brings it home with a thud. Not a fond memory, this. She stands in the hallway of the Bronze and thinks back to her stay in Spike's mind. Maybe his weren't his fondest memories either. That seems to be the roads Orpheus takes you on, and she should remember that and not dwell on those hurts.

Heartened by her own pep talk she goes in and her breath stops when she sees Spike lounging behind that pillar. His body language is like she's never seen it before, never consciously anyway;, defensive, fidgety, full of insecurity disguised as brittle bravado. God, he's so cute like that.

Faith sways towards him in her Buffy suit and the words roll out of her mouth like they did in reality, ride him, pop him like warm champagne, but now she really means it and she sees in his puzzled face that he's touched by them against his will. He can sense she's serious, at least for that moment, and then she feels his eyes rove over her, the kindling of genuine interest in his blue eyes. She has a flash of intuition. Did she cause his initial interest in Buffy? Did it all start in this moment of an autopilot Faith come-on? She'll never know if it's true, but it’s a gut-zinging thought. Heh. Take that, Buffy, the perfect, eternally unavailable competition.

She can walk away now. There's nothing here for her. Past, all past. The past is boring and she should stop dwelling on it and go for her future, something. She doesn’t know what it is yet, but she's gonna find out. This Orpheus thing's gonna bend to her will, she knows she can do it. Faith returns to the outside, and the yelling and the screaming and the burning of tires is still going on, but she's the Slayer and she doesn’t fear a couple of redneck demons on the rampage. She stands ion an intersection, only half recognizing Sunnydale, and in the distance, she sees a spot of light. That's where she wants to go, she knows, suddenly sure.

At first, she doesn’t know what she's walking towards, a brightly lit stadium maybe, or a block of houses on fire, but since this is Sunnydale, it turns out to be a bright spot in the middle of a graveyard. When she comes closer, she sees it’s actual sunlight. Her heart yearns towards the bright green lawn and the blue sky like never before. Up until now, she's always resigned herself to a life in darkness, but when she sees the sun dappling the trees she knows that this is what she wants. Life. Her pink flowered dress swishes softly around her knees, the grass is cool against her bare feet. She sits down at the red and white checkered picnic cloth, waiting for him to show up. 

But he doesn't. He won’t, Faith guesses. Which is sad, but he's not her guide and example anymore. He can't be.  She might wish he could still be, but she's gone beyond that place where he was her father for a while. The kids sitting around her giggle and whisper, in happy anticipation of the food the mother is doling out. Her capable tanned hands toss down paper plates with uncanny accuracy. Faith gets one too and she chokes up with the shock of acceptance. The sun tickles her neck and the little girl on her right leans a warm little arm against her and puts a chubby hand on her knee. Faith strokes the dark down-soft hair and her whole being fills to the brim with tenderness. Sunlight, food, high children's voices, the sounds scatter and flow around her like that high far buzzing you get in summer when a jets passes over. The distilled sound of summer. She wants to see the mother's face, but it's continually turned away from her. For a second, understanding reaches her but she can't put words to what she knows. Her heart is light as she pours the lemonade. If this is the future she could make, she so wants it. 

She doesn't want to leave, but a movement at the edge of the sunny green lawn catches her eyes. There, the darkness begins again. The trees loom menacingly and scary shapes with tentacles and horns are almost visible between the tombs and gravestones. Moonlight snags on bright platinum hair and she knows she isn't ready yet. She gets up, leaves the chattering children to their mother's care, and walks towards the darkness. It's still hers to rule, but she will always be able to find the sunlight now that she knows it's inside her. Besides, the darkness has unfinished business for her. 

She holds out her hand to Spike. "Come on, baby, we gotta get out of here." 

He resists, holding her hand but hanging back. "I'm a creature of darkness."

She pulls him along. "You gotta step outta that metaphor, baby. It's just night, you know, not Hell. We got work to do."

He hesitates, but nods and falls in step with her. Faith knows where she's going, although she couldn’t say exactly where that is and leads them towards it. His hands slips out of hers. She wants it back, but his voice stops her. 

"Don't look back, Faith. I will follow you."

"But ,–" she protests. She keeps the rest of the sentence in. He's right. This feels like something she ought to do exactly this way, her in front and Spike following her into the light. Step by step, they return to the world of the living. When she gets close, the going gets tougher. It was so easy to step into the sunlit glade on her own, but now the darkness seems to hold her back, or is it the heavy weight she's dragging? He's not heavy, he's her Spike. Her foot takes an age to complete the last step, and the sun fills her up like a light bulb turning on, but it's not finished. Spike has to take the last step as well, and it’s the hardest thing she's ever done not to look back to him to urge him on.

A dark shape comes to stand beside her. He's like a blemish on the grass, but the sunlight in the dream doesn’t burn him. His hand, shaking in the bright light, is white as death. Faith takes it anyway. And they stand there silently for a while, looking at the green of the lawn, lit from within with an unnatural glowy greenness. 

Spike breathes out a sigh of, what, regret?

The picnicking family is gone, leaving crushed grass and crumbs in their wake. Faith is sad they're not there, but she's sure she'll see them again sometime if she wants. She closes her eyes, her hand still in Spike's.

"I think I snagged her spirit. I sense the web of scattered energy consolidating," Faith hears Willow say. "She should be returning to her body."

"So we're back to where we started?" Kennedy says, skepticism dripping from her voice. But that's just Ken. Doubting authority is her main thing, except where Faith is concerned, of course.  Faith runs a tight ship. Or make that, 'ran'. Kennedy is not her Number One anymore.

Hey, if she can hear she must be not only in her body but awake. She tries to turn her head and shift Spike off her but it's like trying to open an out of date drawbridge. In theory, the machinery is intact, but in actuality, every single nut and bolt is rusty and stuck. She needs a little help here please. Are these people not paying any attention to her physical body?

Finally, she prods her throat into producing a gargle and all the able-bodied creatures in the room spring into action. 

"Faith! Faith, you're alive! You're back!"  Kennedy shouts joyfully in her ear and Faith cringes inwardly, because her cringing muscles ain't working so good yet.

"Let's get Spike off her," Angel suggests practically, and Faith would hug him if she could. Or maybe she wouldn't, because her dreams were kind of icky.

"Oy," someone says slowly and thickly. "Hands off me, you berk. Give a man some privacy."

Spike is back too. Faith didn’t have hardly a doubt about that after leading him out of the garden of the night. Whoa, flowery words alert. She is awake, right? 

"Pinch me," she croaks out to Ken when Spike has lifted his heavy cold self off her chest with much groaning and cursing.

Faith watches Kennedy's fingers take a bit of her own pale skin between their tips and squeeze. A beat. The skin stays up in a funny ridge, like her Gran's skin would. Another beat. Pain flares through her and a flush of blood shoots to her face. Her heart beats a fast solo and she starts gasping for air.

"She's crashing!" Angel shouts and Willow and Kennedy materialize at her side.

"Give her some air," Spike wheezes. "She's a Slayer, she'll be fine." 

He's standing right next to her, looking a little bit more like a corpse than he usually does, and the certainty in his voices calms Faith down a little. Her eyes and her whole head start to hurt and pins and needles and whole fucking barbecue forks start pricking in her hands and feet. She screams out her pain and that seems to clear her lungs.

"Massage her feet," Spike barks to Angel and he grabs her hands himself. 

Faith whimpers and wants to move her head but a muscle spasm prevents her. Great, a wryneck. Her stomach starts cramping and she can hardly swallow. 

"Water."

Kennedy produces the sponge again, but Spike instructs her to get a cup and a straw.

The joy of having made it back is getting to be kind of a downer because of the pains and the itching, and she kind of smells herself, which is gross, and also  Wesley is looking pained instead of joyful. His stomach is hurting him, or he's working up some righteous anger, Faith can’t tell under all that stubble. Someone is going to give her a talking-to, she's sure. She doesn’t care, as long as she's back.

*

It takes Wesley almost fainting to get everybody out of the apartment. Faith rises creakily to her feet, wrapped in a smooth red shirt of Spike's. She looks him straight in the eyes. Meeting it head-on, like a woman. "Can I have a shower before you give me the big talk?" she asks. "I feel like shit."

Spike takes one big step and hugs her to his bare chest, the button of his pants and its hard seams digging into her oversensitive, coz dehydrated skin. "Christ, Faith, what the hell were you thinking?"

Faith leans into him, woozy with relief. And hunger. Spike holds her more firmly. "No shower, sweetheart. I'm gonna draw you a bath and feed you while you soak. How does that sound?"

Sounds like heaven. Faith sits on the bathroom floor, because she's too weak to stand for long, and watches Spike potter about filling the bath, lighting candles he found somewhere, and her heart aches with love. Knowing that it's going to end one day makes her love him even more and with a fiercer, hotter flame. There is no forever. There is just today, and making the most of it. 

"I love you so much, Spike," she says. Her voice sounds like she's rubbing her elbows together behind her back, but she can already sense improvement from the first word she said.

Spike smiles at her from behind the little candle in his hands. "Love you too, baby. Even when you do dumb stuff."

"I know it was dumb. I knew it when I was doing it and I couldn't stop," Faith says. "But I'm not sorry. I feel like I got something out of it. Something big."

Spike frowns a little. "So what did you learn inside my head?" 

He kneels next to her and helps her gently out of the shirt. He supports her into the bath, which is like falling into a tub of heavenly butter. Her skin cells slurp up the moisture and even her brain gets a little clearer.

"Nothing I didn't know already," she says. "It's the trip inside my own head that was the big present." 

His eyes are like black holes and his cheekbones are highlighted by the flickering candle light. 

"So aren't you mad I rummaged in your memories?"

"I'm sad you didn't just ask for the things you wanted to know," he says. 

Faith heart misses a beat. Dawn. He thinks she wanted to find out exactly what he did to Dawn, and how and how many times. He still feels guilty about that, she guesses. She did want to know that. She wonders why she didn't go dig those memories up. Maybe Spike was in control the whole time and only showed her things she didn't care about, like Drusilla, or things she already knew? She decides to take it as a sign. She fucking well knows stuff went on, and is it really going to help knowing whether they did it once or ten times a day? She could have asked last year, but now it should just be history. 

"I know the things I need to know. Not all the things I want to know would be good for me, I know that. So don't tempt me. And never, ever, leave me in the dark again. I'm not your pawn to be played, I'm a Slayer."

Spike hesitates.

"Even if it's about Drusilla. I know you loved her, and you and Angel had this rivalry about her? I don’t care, it's in the past. But in the present, I do need to know everything. You don’t get to take the decisions even if you are my Watcher."

"Promise," Spike says, his voice gravelly with seriousness. "Don't know what I'd do without you. You keep me on the straight and narrow."

Faith keeps him both _in_ the sunlight, and _out_ of in the literal sense. And she doesn't give a fuck if Buffy is the sun in both these meanings. 

"Now get in here and hold me."

He does. And Faith had no doubts whatsoever that he would. Fucking weird how she didn’t get any answers about their relationship and everything's still different. That's deep shit, dude.

*

"So," Kennedy says.

Faith is grateful that Ken is breaking the silence for her, but that doesn't mean that she now knows what to say.

"Can we get it over with, guys?" she says anyway. "Just give me the ranting and the preaching., the Faith you shouldn’t have done its, what were you thinking, you endangered two lives, yadda yadda yadda. And then we can get on with more important things like Angel and stuff."

"In that case," Wesley's still reedy voice says, "I will dispense with the sermon, since you are quite aware of the consequences, and tell you instead that I'm glad you made it back."

"Thanks, Wes," Faith says, a little shamefacedly. "I apologize for taking the Orpheus off you."

"I apologize for giving it to you in the first place," Wesley says.

"You remember?"

"Yes," he says. He looks at Angel. "Torture turns out to be a great memory-refresher. We will talk about it at some point, Angel. I don’t feel up to it right now."

Angel shifts in his chair. "I'm sorry, Wes. , but I had my reasons."

Wesley holds up an almost translucent hand. It's a miracle he survived. Faith has learned she and Spike were in their coma for a week. That week was barely enough for Wesley to show the first signs of recuperation, and he's only recently awakened form from the 14-hour sleep he needed after coaching Willow through the Orpheus detoxification process.

"I do not want to hear them right now, Angel. Talk to me when you're back from Africa."

"If I make it back from Africa," Angel says, a little bitterly, but nobody in the room budges an inch, and he bows his big head in resignation.

"So who's going?" Faith asks brightly. She's still sore all over, and she keeps on drinking everything liquid in sight, but the years of Slaying have made her used to waiting out her healing period. She'll be okay soon enough.

"I am," Kennedy says. "I'm taking a couple of the new girls Willow brought along. We'll be fine with Angel. Willow and Wesley are giving us some extra stuff to bring in case Angel he gets frisky."

"I've given my word to win the soul," Angel says frostily. "And I never get frisky."

Willow shakes her head at him. "It's not just you we're concerned about. You as Angelus are a symbol and a potentially useful tool – em, ally, to a lot of factions in the demon community. And anyway, it's not up to you. Ten Slayers and a witch should be enough for anything they try to fling at us during the voyage."

"We could take my private jet," Angel admits in an embarrassed mumble.

Faith stifles her laugh at the amazement on the faces around her. Good on Angel. She feels vaguely guilty at not coming along to help him, but Spike must be her priority for now. The sunny image from her Orpheus dreams is clear and bright in a special corner in her mind, but it'll stay fresh. No need to hurry towards it yet. She has time. And if she hasn't, being a Slayer and having the lifespan of a mayfly, it's better not to have it at all. She says goodbye to the park and the picnic lunch and the kids, without regrets. For now.


	13. Epilogue

Rattle. Plop. Whisper.

Faith opens one eye to think better about these mysterious noises. If her internal demon-o-meter had been signaling she'd have been up and running already, totally prepped for slaying, so that's not it. Something in the brief burst of sound flags danger, but of an unknown kind. She rolls off her still sleeping mobile AC-unit and pads to the front door, her bare feet slapping softly on the wooden floor.

It's a letter. It lies there, pale pink and smelling of glue and postman, a handwritten address visible on top. It's kind of exciting. Faith doesn’t think she's ever had a real letter in her life, as opposed to bank statements and eviction notices. Not that bank statements don’t give her a proud little thrill every time they come in, serious wage earner here.

She stalks the letter, circles it, wondering what it will contain and trying to put off the moment when she'll know. Ha. She pounces. Picks up the letter and holds it against her face, savoring the slight crackle of the paper. She reads the address.

'W. Spike' it reads. Oh no. She's pretty sure she knows who it’s from: the 'I' is dotted with a little heart. She checks the return address to be absolutely certain, and sure enough, it reads, "Dawn Summers, etcetera, Boston.”

Faith thinks of slamming the bedroom door open and whipping the thin cotton sheet off Spike. He’ll be sprawled all over the space she vacated a few minutes ago, burrowing mindlessly after her warmth and scent. She wants to haul him up, slap him awake and smack him against the headboard.

She doesn't do any of these things. She puts the letter on the kitchen table against the vase of yellow nice smelling flowers she doesn’t know the name of, and walks to the bathroom. When she's done, she gets back to the kitchen. Spike hasn’t even started the coffee yet, he's just standing there all naked and pretty, staring at the letter and pulling his lip.

"Go read it! Go see what Dawnie’s got to say. Probably gonna pour out her little girlie heart to you." It comes out a lot less even-tempered than she'd planned.

 "Don't get all pissy with me first thing in the morning, honey. I haven't so much as heard from the girl in more than a year, you know that. Maybe she wants to apologize."

His voice is reasonable and his face is calm. Faith wants him to show more reaction, defend himself, not this bread pudding blandness. She pinches his ass, trying to shake him out of his intent staring.

Spike's right hand picks her right hand off his butt without looking up from his concentrated scrutiny. "Stop the dramatics, love. Don't you have to get ready for work?"

Of course she does, but there's not that much of a hurry. Her classes don't start before ten, and it's only seven thirty in the morning. 

Faith gives up. She takes herself to the bathroom and showers angrily and alone. One letter from Disturbed Teenage Temptress and there's no wake-up sex and no shared shower. Even at a distance, Dawn has the power to meddle in their relationship. She puts on her clothes and checks her looks in the mirror. She wouldn't have believed she'd wear another dress in her life, but here she is in a slinky spaghetti-strapped number, simply because it's the coolest thing you can wear here. And no boots but strappy sandals instead. She'll be buying a purse next; she thinks and puts up her hair, which again is better than having hot heavy tresses trapping the heat against her neck.

She looks in on the kitchen, expecting Spike to be ready on the balcony with coffee and heated croissants as usual, and he is, but he’s also still reading the flimsy pink sheets. The old scar tissue on her heart contracts and starts to burn. She really hopes there isn't going to be a repeat of last year. The courtyard garden is quiet; no sign of the demon love-in cum riot from last night. She loves New Orleans; it’s so old, so lived in. For the first time in her life, she can imagine staying here for years. Or forever. Faith still likes the heat that wakes them up early. She's lived in Cleveland less than a year, but the fear of cold has settled deep in her bones. She loves New Orleans. It's hot, it's colorful, there's so many freaks of every possible human- and demonkind that a Slayer is hardly noticeable. She isn't budging from here any time soon. She loves the apartment, too. All is right with Faith.

Faith sighs and tries to shake of the forebodings of doom and disaster, which make the hazy sunny morning a few degrees darker. She sprawls in her chair and takes a shot at unconcerned sipping of her coffee, no need for Spike to see her freak out at the first pink letter that comes along. Her coffee scorches a path down her gullet and she can't help coughing and needs two glasses of water to stop feeling like an exhaust tube.

Spike glances up and puts a hand on her knee while he continues to read the three closely written pages. No point in hiding anything from Spike, of course. Faith can't and won't read the words, but sees many hearts, flowers and exclamation points. At last, Spike puts down the letter and absentmindedly sugars his coffee again. He starts drinking and rakes his right hand through his hair, which is still in its wildly curling natural state; that is if you discount the bleach job.

Faith can't stand the suspense anymore. "Well? Tell me!" she demands. 

Spike raises his eyebrows and sighs. "Just a letter, Faith. Dawn is inviting me to her graduation."

Faith clenches her stomach muscles in a vain attempt to stop her heart from plummeting down to her shoes. Jesus. She was over this. She was all revelationy and enlightened after her Orpheus trip, but Dawn's like a corn, always coming back no matter how often you have a pedicure. "Oh? You going?"

Spike shakes his head. "Don't think so. Can't imagine I'd be safe from accidentally falling into chair legs and wooden tool handles with the Watcher and the Carpenter around."

This answer fails to satisfy. "Would you want to go if that wasn't an issue?"

Spike purses his lips and appears to be thinking deeply. The oven pings and he gets up to get the croissants out. He puts one of Faith's plate without flinching, but Faith knows from experience that it will burn her fingers if she tries to eat it at once. Spike tears of a chunk of one of her croissants to have a taste, like he does every morning. He's till searching for the right brand, the one that will taste like real Parisian croissants. Faith likes them all, and tries hard to distinguish between them, but her palate for croissants remains undeveloped so far.

She's still waiting for his answer. Spike sighs again. "Dunno. Yeah. I'd like to see her again, be her friend. But I don't think it would be good for her."

Faith looks hard at her croissants. They are gold and brown and one of them has dark chocolate in it.

She feels a cool thumb under her chin and Spike lifts her face to his. "You are more important to me than Dawn, Faith. Not going."

The sun bursts through the clouds and birds start singing their little asses off. "Okay," Faith says. "You could write back to her?" She's feeling very generous-minded now.

She snuggles onto Spike's lap and gives him a relieved kiss. A faint breeze stirs the gauzy white curtains that frame the balcony doors. She has remembered which movie it was, and hey, it was The Hunger. Trust her to think a vampire movie romantic. 

Time flies by and suddenly she's in a hurry. She stuffs a perfect croissant in her mouth and grabs the other to eat it in the car. 

"See you tonight, sweetie. Give me a call when you know what time Angel's plane lands, okay? Angel is coming to New Orleans to show off his shiny new permanent soul. And his girlfriend. Angel is dating a werewolf. They'll be all supernatural creatures together, hurray. She and Spike are having dinner with the two of them like a normal couple. Faith expects little in the way of actual entertainment tonight, but it might go better than she expects. She's not taking any bets on it, though. Spike swats her ass appreciatively and waves her goodbye. He usually gets back into bed before starting his afternoon routine of Internet searches and reading. He takes his Watcherly duties very seriously these days.

The moist heat outside presses in on Faith like a big sweaty hand and forces her to take it slow. She walks to her car, proudly parked in the driveway. It's her very own car, bought with her very own hard-earned money after she got her driver's license. It's not new or pretty, but it's hers and hers alone and it makes her feel like a real girl. It doesn't have AC, so the drive to work is still a hot one, but it's so much better than walking to the bus, riding on two buses and another walk. Spike hates air conditioning, and she gets that. He says it makes too much noise, and the scents of the surrounding world are masked or drowned out, and that a Slayer and a Vampire need those sounds and smells for their work. 

She walks past the big place on the corner and checks it out as she always does. It's on sale, and has been since they came here, and she's found demon squatters there on several occasions. There is a new smell that overlays the usual swampy undertone of decay that always hangs in the air here, something exotic and spicy. She'll send Spike around to take a better sniff tonight. 

Spike. The thought of him and Dawn still brings tears to her eyes, even though she is as sure as can be that Spike loves her. Dawn is always going to be Buffy's sister, and as such a threat that will never go away completely. Spike is obviously trying to be the best boyfriend he can, looking after her in every way possible, making their place look nice and classy as he never did in Cleveland, accompanying her on patrol, helping her study, even taking a job to help pay the rent. They're not in the employ of the Council anymore, and she prefers it that way. She's still doing her duty, slaying almost every night, and although relations with Kennedy and Morgan in Cleveland, and with Willow all over the world are cordial, she doesn’t want to be beholden to the Council, certainly not to Giles. She still hasn’t forgiven him for sending Dawn to her.

She arrives safe and in time for her first class. She changes into workout clothes and goes to limber up and chat with her boss Claude. She's been really lucky to get a job like this, and all because she saved him from being b killed and eaten by a group of man-eating demons. She even brought him to the ER on a sudden impulse, and he was so grateful, not to mention impressed by her fighting prowess, that he's offered her a job in his exercise club.

The first class is mostly housewives looking to burn off some fat, which is the hardest class for Faith. She has to tone down her natural style and energy so much she's exhausted at the end of it. She burns off the shackled feeling by punishing the punching bag as hard as she can. Claude brews her coffee while she's cooling down. Drinking coffee and discussing the boys they're training for the local Tae Kwon Do contests has become a daily ritual.

"I think we need to watch that Tonio," Faith says. "He's got some Mayfiar demon mixed in there or I'm no Slayer."

"So?" Claude says with an unaccustomed snap in his voice. "He can’t mix with us pure blooded humans?"

Claude's a bleached looking seventy-year old,, but his reactions make Faith think he's probably got a drop or two of African blood somewhere in his ancestry. 

Faith ignores the subtext. "It wouldn't matter if it was most other kinds of demon, but Mayfiars are super strong and have precognition. Wouldn't be fair to the other contestants if he could use that in fights."

'Oh, that kind of mixed blood. Sure. I guess demons have their own competitions?"

Faith shakes her head and leans back against the wall, balancing on tow chair legs, her legs on the table. "You don't wanna know, believe me, Claude."

They talk on comfortably, aimlessly knowing that they will be working hard again in ten minutes. Faith loves her job. She does it well; there is sunlight involved and actual non-demonic and non-Slayer people. It's not a direct route to red gingham picnic blankets and 2.5 kids, but it's not like she wants that now. Ten years is fine. If she lives that long. She stands up and stretches her latissimus dorsi  hard.  She yanked a demon's four-feet long horn out last night and she still feels it. This is her life. It's good.

 

** THE END**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Authors' note: At some point in the future there will be a fourth and last story in the Faith saga, or maybe I should call it an epilogue. Sign up for my notification group and you'll be sure not to miss it….


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